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,