Author: Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander
Classic fiction (pre c 1945)
Published on 7 November 2024 by PUSHKIN PRESS (Pushkin Press Classics) in the United Kingdom.
Paperback | 288 pages
129 x 198 x 25 | 256g
'Gripping'
- Telegraph
'Brilliant' - Sunday
Times
'Riveting' -
Guardian
The
devastating rediscovered classic written from the horrors of Nazi Germany, as
one Jewish man attempts to flee persecution in the wake of
Kristallnacht
BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1938. With storm
troopers battering against his door, Otto Silbermann must flee out the back
of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is
Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their
businesses destroyed.
Turned away from establishments he
had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life
as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to
conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a
race to escape this homeland that is no longer home.
Twenty-three-year-old
Ulrich Alexander 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. Shot through with Hitckcockian tension,
The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight
and survival in Nazi Germany.