The Emigrants (New Directions Paperbook)

...survive. There have been literally thousands of books written about the Holocaust, and I have read my share of Primo Levi, but WG Sebald's "The Emigrants" has to be in the top five in conveying its absolute horror and devastation. He manages to accomplish this rather elliptically, and with much understatement, by depicting the lives of four individuals who "got out in time," but they were never able to overcome the terrible dislocation that occurred, and in the majority of the cases it resulted in suicide, direct, or incidental, as may very well have been the case with Levi. This dislocation has occurred to others, and continues to occur today, but in terms of graphics, I think of a drawing at a friend's house, of Andrew Jackson, holding an uprooted tree, and if one looks closely, one realizes that the tree is composed of individuals who composed the Cherokee Nation, who were forcibly relocated from their homeland by him."The Emigrants" is composed on the stories of four individuals, one from Lithuania, three from Germany, all of whom were very much citizens, and felt as though they belonged to their countries, but who were also Jewish, or only partially Jewish, and in varying ways were rejected by their homeland. They went, or were forced into exile. Sebald writes masterfully, and the stories mount in a rising crescendo of nuance, complexity and sorrow, from Dr. Henry Selwyn who becomes a hermit on his own estate, through the school teacher; Paul Bereyter, Jewish enough to be denied his teaching post, but not Jewish enough to prevent being drafted into the Wehrmacht; to Ambros Adlewarth, who made it to America, and served as a butler of sorts to exclusive Jewish families; and finally to Max Ferber, the artist who escaped to Manchester, England. There are quite a few thoughtful reviews of this book, and I do not need to duplicate their descriptions of these stories.Sebald is a masterful writer, with excellent erudition, who weaves esoteric facts and tales into his main story, without it ever seeming contrived. For example, there is the "butterfly man," who makes a cameo appearance throughout the book, and who is Vladimir Nabokov, the lepidopterist, and one of the ultimate Jewish emigrants, who had to leave his cozy life in his native Czarist Russia, but later capture that period in his excellent autobiography, "Speak, Memory." And there is Coubert's painting, "The Oak of Vercingetorix," which appears in the story on the painter Max Ferber. There is also a masterful portrait of the "proud tower" that was Europe in 1913, in which Sebald paints the life of the "rich and famous" in Deauville (France) that would have been worthy of, and could have come from the pages of Marcel Proust. Sebald introduces a new novelist technique of including black and white photographs which illustrate his story, and are referenced on the page which they occur. The photos are often grainy, and even out of focus, and none are worse than the one of the storyteller by the ocean on page 89. At first I thought this technique dreadful, but as I progressed through the book, I realized how important they were as an integral part of the story; they were the "real life" of actual family photos, the set-piece poses, the skewed perspectives, all of which seemed to fit perfectly by the end of the book.Sadly, six months ago I had never heard of Sebald, and now I realize that he is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and the credit goes to the Amazon review program, and the strong recommendation of a fellow reviewer, R. M. Peterson, my "neighbor to the north" in Santa Fe. Kudos to both for the enriching recommendations. "The Rings of Saturn" will not be far behind. Obviously a 5-star plus book.

Leaving one's area of origin, and the emotional impact of doing so, is at the heart of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. I thought it was a novel when I picked it out for my Kindle, but it's not: it's a collection of four short stories on a common theme. The first two stories are fairly short and deal with men displaced in Europe as a result of their Jewish heritage during World War 2, and the second two are longer and deal with transnational migrations, with one story having no apparent connection to Jewishness and the second being the most explicitly tied to the Holocaust of all four of them, as well as being the only story primarily based in a female perspective.All of the stories end in tragedy, and only one is told even in part as a first-person narrative. It gives the book a sense of remove, and the beauty of Sebald's language makes it feel like almost like an elegy in prose form. The power of loss and memory is gorgeously and movingly conveyed...every one of these stories gently rips your heart out. As someone who doesn't particularly enjoy short stories, I found that this was a very well-done collection of them. There aren't too many, and they are all arranged around a similar theme in a way that really works and keeps the stories flowing together and seeming like one piece. Like four movements to a piece of music. I would definitely recommend it, but maybe if you're not in a low mood already, because as lovely as it is, it's a downer.

If you love zippy dialogue, flashy repartee, a plot full of tantalizing twists, or just a plain old-fashioned plot, this book is not for you. And that's a pity, too, because you'll miss a rare reading experience that takes you deep into the spectral world of memory without a trace of the distorting effects of nostalgia.This genre-defying book at times comes across as a memoir, at times as tracts from a meticulous social science project, and at times as pure poetry. In the newness of its from and along with the odd collection of photographs that break up the text, this book can mesmerize and transport you into another world and time ... and all without a single line of dialogue or reference to trendy obsessions of either popular or politically correct culture.And yet, the book is filled with voices as the narrator -- who may or may not be Sebald himself -- relates the stories of four German emigrants over the course of the twentieth century. In the process of telling their stories by any means he can, be it through the stories of those who knew them, or through their own writings, or through dreams, we come to experience the narrator's own displacements in time and space. Paradoxically, even as the narratives are about displacement, Sebald captures a firm sense of place that is reminiscent of nineteenth century traditions both in letters and in life.If there is no plot in the traditional sense to keep you turning the pages, there is the complex score of voices of the different storytellers to keep you always a little off-balance. You hear the music, as it were, but you are never quiet sure who is singing the tune. But it doesn't matter, because what seems to be at stake is the music itself, and whether it can bring back not the dead so much, as the world that gave them shape and sustenance.If Proust went in search of lost time through memory, Sebald, who can't trust memory, which is a kind of "dumbness" that "makes one's head heavy and giddy," goes in search of place to capture moments of life that are irrevocably tied to place.And, it is the description of places -- sometimes of the same places twice by different people or by the same people at different times -- that orchestrates the seemingly random tales and disjointed voices of the storytellers into a requiem for what has been lost.The narrator of The Emigrant is a painstakingly conscientious Orpheus then, who descends deeper into the shadows cast over the world by the Third Reich, hoping to bring back his beloved Eurydice -- a sense of life rooted in place -- as she once was, but could never be, even if she could rise from those muddled depths.Since Sebald's recent death (December 2001), his work is likely to be fresh fodder for many Ph.D. theses, literary conferences, articles, etc. Don't let that deter you from reading Sebald's work. Forget about the narratives of literary critics and pick up The Emigrant [and his other work] if you want to understand something more deeply about the nature of exile in the twentieth century.If you think that you have little in common with the characters in this book or with exiles in general, think again. When what is local about where you live, be it a mom-and-pop grocery store, or some weird-looking, but much-beloved, building goes by the way of the bulldozer to make room for some ubiquitous chainstore or restaurant, a part of you, the one that is tied to place, is sure to suffer some measure of loss.

This is a slow, meditative read. Beautiful writing but the story at times appears undramatic, even prosaic. But the more you read, the more that what is outside the margins, between the lines, unsaid but hinted at, begins to envelop one's reading. In the end this book packs a mighty emotional punch and it brought me deep into powerful feelings of loss, exile and rage at crimes too great to portray justly or maybe even imagine. This book contains a heartbreaking cry (in both senses - tears and anger) for humanity. It has been a long time since I have been so bowled over by a book.

Este é um livro difícil de se classificar - reportagem ou ficção? -, mas incrivelmente bem escrito, com um olhar profundo, descrente e amoroso sobre a condição humana. Quatro histórias de vida, baseadas em personagens reais, nos conduzem ao coração sempre sofrido do emigrante que não consegue se livrar do passado - nem tampouco fazer as pazes com ele . Há, entretanto, uma doçura cativante que permeia todo o texto dessas quatro narrativas, em uma espécie de câmera lenta literária, que por vezes me lembrou a delicadeza do olhar cinematográfico de Ingmar Bergman, no seu perturbador Morangos Silvestres. Assim como a obra de Bergman, o texto de Sebald invade vagarosamente o nosso coração e se instala por lá, sem qualquer intenção de ir embora. Vou sentir saudades deste livro, tocantemente perspicaz e encantador.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I often thought about it throughout my day and looked forward to reading it when going to bed.

Sebald is unique. Should be read by anyone trying to make sense of the history of Europe and by everybody else, really, He captures the reader from the first word and by the end you just wish the book went on and on,

Like other Sebald works, this takes you to a completely different place and guides you gently through a web of seemingly unrelated narratives allowing you to create your own links and themes. For me this is compulsive reading.