Henry Holt and Company/Metropolitan Books, 266 pages, $24.99
A feverish urgency infuses Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered novel about a frantic German Jewish businessman after Kristallnacht, an internal refugee whose doomed travels both echoed and prefigured the author’s own.
Boschwitz’s Jewish father had converted to Christianity and died before Ulrich’s birth in 1915. Even so, Boschwitz had left Germany for Sweden with his Protestant mother in 1935 as restrictions against Jews mounted. He studied in Paris, at the Sorbonne, then decamped to Luxembourg, Belgium and England.
But he must have been following the unfolding disaster in his native country closely, even if from a distance. “The Passenger,” his second novel, has a chilling emotional intimacy. Written in a matter of weeks, the book originally appeared in 1939 in England and shortly afterward in France and the United States. An edited version finally was published in Germany in 2018, to general acclaim,
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On the Run From the Nazis, Taking Train After Train
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, author of “The Passenger.”Credit.via Leo Baeck Institute New York
By Michael Hofmann
THE PASSENGER
Translated by Philip Boehm
Sometimes an author’s story and the story of the author’s fate jump up to greet us simultaneously, and we don’t know which has more power to move us. Especially when both, in a sense, are outlines rushed, unfinished or barely finished sketches.
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, a young writer and Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, drowned in 1942 when the ocean liner MV Abosso was torpedoed by a German submarine in the North Atlantic. Along with the ship’s 362 passengers and crew members, the waters took the revised manuscript of “Der Reisende,” Boschwitz’s bold second novel, which had previously appeared in English as “The Man Who Took Trains” in Britain, and “The Fugitive” in the United States. On publication, it received middling reviews. Boschwitz kep
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