Best of
European-Literature

1981

The Palace of Dreams


Ismail Kadare - 1981
    A sinister totalitarian ministry called the Palace of Dreams recruits Mark-Alem to sort, classify, and interpret the dreams of the people in the empire, seeking the master-dreams that give clues to the empire's destiny.

The Wandering Jew


Stefan Heym - 1981
    In turn, Ahasverus was cursed to roam the earth until the Second Coming. Stefan Heym's novel re-creates and expands this myth to propose that the right synthesis of love and rebellion can bring humankind to the Kingdom of Heaven.Heym introduces both Ahasverus and Lucifer as angels cast out of heaven for their opinions on God's order. Their respective oppositions continue throughout the rest of time: Ahasverus remains defiant through protest rooted in love and a faith in progress, while Lucifer is rebellious by means of his old, familiar methods. In a funny eternity of run-ins, debates, and meddling with characters such as Christ, a disciple of Luther, and a Marxist professor in East Germany, Ahasverus and Lucifer struggle on, awaiting the Second Coming.

Conversations


Czesław Miłosz - 1981
    He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity.In the years of loneliness and labor, Milosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and preoccupations and enjoying the devotion of his students at the University of California, Berkeley. International fame came like lightning when Milosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations collects pieces from a wide range of sources over twenty-five years and includes an unpublished interview between Milosz and his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. This volume acquaints us with a man whose work, life, and thought defy easy characterization. He is a sensualist with a scholar's penchant for history, as likely to celebrate Heraclitus as the hooks on a woman's corset. He is a devout but doubting Catholic, and a thinker tinged with a heretical sensibility.Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Cortland Review.

My Longest Night


Genevieve Duboscq - 1981
    She and her family, including an illiterate, abusive, alcoholic but resourceful father, rescued and sheltered scores of them. In a childlike style that reflects the excitement of those dramatic, danger-filled days, she relives the emotions of the irrepressible and plucky young heroine as she and her mother nursed the wounded and comforted the dying, both American and German, while her father salvaged precious stores from the water. Duboscq, severely injured and disfigured in a land-mine explosion that killed her brother, credits surviving five years of surgical procedures, and the tribulations of later life, in part to the inspiration she derived from the suffering and bravery of the soldiers she met during this childhood experience, an act of courage for which she was awarded France's Legion of Honor.

Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan


Chaim Aron Kaplan - 1981
    It ends in August 1942, when Kaplan realized that the Nazi noose was around his neck. Today Kaplan's diary stands as an extraordinary record of the Nazi destruction of Warsaw's Jewish community. It is as timely as ever.

In the Ruins of the Reich


Douglas Botting - 1981
    Botting concentrates on the defining events that took place in the period between the collapse of the Third Reich and the foundation of the new Germanys to create the prevailing atmosphere of a most unusual and little-charted time in history. This was a period when four of the strongest industrial nations to emerge from World War Two attempted to work together to govern the once strong Germany, now prostate, impoverished and devastated by war and defeat. Telling the story of the dynamics between occupiers and occupied, the crimes perpetrated by both and the Imperial tendencies of the occupiers, Botting shows that the plan to bring democracy to Germany was far from flawless or straightforward. Timely republication of a classic book on a fascinating but often overlooked period in the history of the Second World War. Published to Coincide with the 60th Anniversary of the end of World War II. 'Graphic and moving...the Germans paid a frightful price for their sins of conquest' Desmond Albrow, Sunday Telegraph