Arriving with his girlfriend at the family cottage for a rendezvous, a young man instead finds his father and two companions torturing a former Nazi concentration camp guard as the crimes of the past are remembered

Bronstein's Children (English and German Edition)

BECKER, Jurek

Literature & Fiction

Harcourt

Jacob the liar

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

An East German schoolteacher , is jolted into an awareness of his mortality by a seeming heart attack. The actions he takes afterword put him on a collisioin course with the state in which he has painlessly, if numbly, lived his life. The rusults, while harsh, are not unwelcome as he finds a new vitality in a world seen through new eyes. Translated by Leila Vennewitz.

Sleepless Days

United States

HarperVia

"East Berlin, 1973: an 18-year-old Jew discovers that his father's friends are holding prisoner a former Nazi concentration camp guard in the family cottage. The three older men have handcuffed the ex-Nazi to the bed and are interrogating and torturing him in an attempt to get him to admit to his war crimes. . . . Becker keenly shows the tension between members of the Holocaust generation and their children, who are unable to understand the complexity of that nightmarish era of human history."—Booklist "[A] chilly, disquieting novel about historical slippage; about the seemingly inevitable decline of horror into a vague and generic recollection. The East German writer has devised something between story and allegory to evoke the cold generational millennium that separates a father, with his concentration-camp memories, from a son, adrift in a society with no memories whatsoever."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Mr. Becker, writing simply and clearly in an unstrained narrative, speaks with the voice of knowledge, and we do well to listen to him."—Eva Figes, New York Times Book Review Jurek Becker (1937-1998) is the author of Jacob the Liar, Sleepless Days, The Boxer, and Amanda Herzlos.

Bronstein's Children

Contemporary

University of Chicago Press

Sleepless days

Secker Warburg

The five stories in this edition are diverse in theme and were chosen to demonstrate Jurek Becker's talent as a storyteller: a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust pretends to become a child again and to re-experience events in a Polish ghetto through his own five-year-old eyes; a loyal servant of the State describes how he himself has come under state surveillance; an official analyzes his own split personality and explains how his alter ego has taken control; a car driver tells how he betrays a fugitive to the police; a young man confronts a housing official with an extraordinary request. Jurek Becker's stories are rooted in his unusual personal history - he was a child in the Lodz ghetto and in concentration camps; then in the former German Democratic Republic he became a loyal party member turned outspoken critic of hard-line trends. His writing transcends the limited context of the GDR, however, and makes political statements which are still relevant today. This critical edition of Becker's work is designed to introduce English readers to this author and to help them explore the texts through the medium of German.

Five Stories (Manchester German Texts) (English and German Edition)

Manchester Univ Pr

Jakob the Liar

Schocken Books

About the Author\nJürek Becker (1937–1997) was a Holocaust survivor and one of the few novelists of Jewish heritage in post–World War II Germany. He was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Jacob the Liar, Sleepless Days, and Bronstein’s Children. Christine Becker grew up in a notable German publishing family and studied German literature and publishing at the Freie University in Berlin. In 2004, Becker edited the published collection of letters written by her husband between 1969–96, entitled Your Nonpareils, followed bya collection of essays, interviews and lectures, entitled My Father, the Germans and I, in 2007; both are published by Suhrkamp. She lives in Berlin.\nJürek Becker (1937–97) is best known for his novel Jacob the Liar, which follows the life of a man, who, like Becker, lived in the Lódz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfiction, and the essays, lectures, and interviews collected in My Father, the Germans and I share a common thread in that they each speak to Becker’s interactions with and opinions on the social, political, and cultural conditions of twentieth-century Germany. 
Becker, who had lived in both German states and in unified Germany, was passionately and humorously active in the political debates of his time. Becker never directly aligned himself with either the political ideology of East Germany or the capitalist market forces of West Germany. The remains of fascism in postwar Germany, and the demise of Socialism, as well as racism and xenophobic violence, were topics that perpetually interested Becker. However, his writings, as evidenced in this collection, were never pedantic, but always entertaining, retaining the sense of humor that made his novels so admired. 
My Father, the Germans and I gives expression to an exceptional author’s perception of himself and the world and to his tireless attempt to bring his own unique tone of linguistic brevity, irony, and balance to German relations.

My Father, the Germans and I: Essays, Lectures, Interviews (The Seagull Library of German Literature)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Seagull Books

Released from a concentration camp after the war, Aron Blank searches desperately for his son, the only surviving member of his family, whom he was forced to abandon when the boy was two years old, and follows his subsequent struggles to rebuild a life for himself in East Berlin.

The Boxer: A Novel

Arcade Publishing

Jacob the Liar

Genre Fiction

Arcade

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