My first contact with Reuella Shachaf came as the result of an interview I gave in December 2015. Avner Shapira, literary critic of the Israeli daily Haaretz, had asked me to discuss Ernst Haffner’s 1932 novel Blood Brothers, which I had rediscovered and which had just come out in a Hebrew translation. After the interview appeared Reuella sent me an email, in which she mentioned her uncle from Berlin Ulrich Boschwitz, whose books had been published in several languages but never in his own native tongue. One book in particular, she wrote, might be of special interest—namely the 1938 novel Der Reisende, whose original German typescript was not with the remaining papers in New York, but since the late 1960s had been housed in Frankfurt, in the German Exile Archive of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. It all sounded so interesting that I traveled to Frankfurt a few days before Christmas 2015 and spent an entire day absorbed in the first and only original copy of the novel.

I quickly found myself riveted by the text, but it was also obvious that the typescript had never been edited, and that a proper editing would only enhance the book’s quality. Furthermore, because Ulrich Boschwitz himself had seen the necessity, and since as mentioned above he had continued to revise the text following its release in England and America, I decided to seek his family’s consent and edit the manuscript just as I would any other text I publish or edit—the only difference being that no exchange with the author would be possible.

But it was inside that little bare room in the otherwise impressively large Nationalbibliothek when I first followed the fate of Otto Silbermann, as he wandered aimlessly across Germany, frightened in the wake of the November pogroms, always in danger of being arrested or denounced. By the time I left the library late in the afternoon it was already dark, it was drizzling outside, and everything I took in as I walked back to my hotel near the train station seemed incredibly dreary and reinforced the enormous sadness I felt after reading the novel. Back in my room I began to refresh my knowledge of the events that occurred in Germany and Austria between November 7 and 13, 1938, and I set out to learn more about Ulrich Boschwitz, whose novel was likely the first literary account of these atrocities.