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Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (photography from the early 1930s) wrote under the pseudonym John Grane
Photo:
Leo Baeck Institute
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz 'long-lost novel "The Traveler" has risen to become a bestseller in Great Britain 82 years after its first publication.
The BBC reports.
"The Passenger", as the novel is now called in the English edition, rose to number 10 on the Sunday Times' bestseller list.
The novel had previously received very good reviews in the British media.
In the novel Boschwitz describes the fate of the Jewish businessman Otto Silbermann, whose Jewish friends and neighbors are arrested by the Nazis, but who himself manages to escape from Berlin.
He tries to leave Germany by train.
But his departure repeatedly fails, and the resistance he experiences ultimately drives him back to Berlin.
Boschwitz, son of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, had fled Germany in 1935 at the age of 20, presumably because of the Nuremberg Laws enacted in the same year.
Boschwitz's father died shortly after his birth, while sister Clarissa emigrated to Palestine in 1933.
Mother and son Boschwitz first moved to Sweden, but after a year they moved on to Norway.
A traveler myself
In 1937, Boschwitz published his first novel in Swedish under the pseudonym John Grane, "People Beside Life," a psychogram of post-war German society in the 1920s. Boschwitz received good reviews for it, but he did not want or could not stay in Scandinavia permanently. He moved on to Paris, also lived in Brussels and Luxembourg. The first version of The Traveler was finally created under the influence of the pogroms of November 9, 1938.
In 1939 the novel was published in Great Britain under the title "The Man Who Took Trains". The reviews were mixed, the novel was not yet recognized as a contemporary document. Boschwitz himself had already traveled to Great Britain at this time, where he was taken to an internment camp for German emigrants on the Isle of Man, where his mother was already imprisoned. From England Boschwitz traveled on to Australia, another stop was in South Africa.
In 1942 a boat was supposed to take him from Cape Town to Liverpool, but the passenger ship was torpedoed by German forces and sank.
Boschwitz died at the age of only 27.
Before that, however, he had sent several pages of manuscript, presumably including a new version of The Traveler, to his mother in England.
"I firmly believe," wrote Boschwitz in a letter to his mother, "that there is something in this book that will make it a success."
The time now seems to have proven him right.
hpi