The Book Beat reading group selection for November is The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. We will meet in store and online via Zoom on Wednesday, December 3, at 7:00 p.m. Books are in stock now and available at a 15% discount.
The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. If you would like to receive updates on the reading group please send us your name, phone, and email.
The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation. The discussion group is free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 or email bookbeatorders@gmail.com for more information.
“Boschwitz was a shrewd observer of his time, but his story still resonates nearly a century later when antisemitism is on the rise once more and the exclusion of those who are different remains a pernicious constant across the globe…The Passenger is a gripping novel that plunges the reader into the gloom of Nazi Germany as the darkness was descending. It deserved to be read when it was written. It certainly deserves to be read now.”
—The Guardian
“A jewel of a rediscovery . . . superbly translated by Philip Boehm . . . The Passenger is a riveting, noirish, intensely filmic portrait of an ambivalent fugitive, cornered but not captured, safest when in motion, at greatest risk when forced to rest.”
—Wall Street Journal
Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train. And then another. And another . . . until his flight becomes a frantic odyssey across Germany, as he searches first for information, then for help, and finally for escape. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control.
Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Long considered lost, the original manuscript was only recently discovered in the German archives and has now been published throughout the world and universally hailed as a masterpiece.
“The Passenger offers an intimate portrait of Jewish life in prewar Nazi Germany at the onset of dehumanization, before the yellow star was imposed. What remains unsettling is how Boschwitz renders the mentality of Germany’s deeply assimilated Jews, who felt more German than Jewish, but ultimately understood the Nazis’ plans and sought to escape a horrific fate.”
–Donald Weber, The Jewish Book Council
“Stunning . . . clairvoyant . . . Boschwitz’s novel pulsates with fine, understated descriptions . . . One comes away marveling not only at Boschwitz’s craftsmanship but at what can only be called his human spirit . . . The Passenger resembles a message in a bottle: cautionary, despairing, a literary warning.”
—Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was born in Berlin in 1915. He fled Germany in 1935 and wrote his novels while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1939, he settled in England, but after the war broke out, England interned him as an “enemy alien”—despite his Jewish background—and subsequently shipped him to Australia. In 1942, Boschwitz was allowed to return to England, but his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine, and he was killed at twenty-seven years old.
Philip Boehm has translated more than thirty novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Ida Fink. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as numerous awards, including the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and the Ungar German Translation Award from the American Translators Association. He also works as a theater director and playwright.