An ambivalent figure who stayed in Germany under the Nazis but was himself repressed by them, Benn came to be considered a great national writer after the war. While Supervert considers Benn mostly overrated, his early Expressionist verse — particularly the Morgue cycle — is matchless for its economy, precision, and irony. Walter Kaufmann, the famous translator of Nietzsche, wrote that its "shocking power," which was "far greater than that of most beatnik poetry," was due to the "brutal honesty of an unprecedented perception."

    His father was German, his mother Czech of partly Jewish origin. Martin was an indifferent student, except for foreign languages, preferring to spend his time with friends, visiting night clubs, playing cards and in female company. He loved the city, the old buildings, and its history. In short, his life was one of pleasant irresponsibility until the Nazis annexed his town of birth and the border region into the German Reich. Life got even more complicated when they marched into Prague and the rest of Bohemia in March 1939. He was twenty then. Prague Winter is a memoir dealing with the life of a young man who gets caught in the cogwheels of the Prague Gestapo machine. It reads like a gripping adventure novel, except for the description of horror scenes. Martin's story explains the step by step tightening of the screw of Nazi terror. His three unsuccessful attempts to flee from Hitler's clutches end in the dreaded Small Fortress prison of Terezin. The story begins with the trial of an SS guard, a mass murderer, whom Martin encountered during his stay in the prison. The next chapters describe Martin's amusing activities before and at the beginning of WWII. But slowly and inexorably things change for the worse. Families of friends are first hit. One of his closest friends is deported. The father of another is killed in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The father of the third is arrested one night and executed the next day. Martin is arrested at work. He suspects it is for his association with an underground organization, but theGestapo releases him the same day. Some members of his organization are arrested and executed. At the same time he is called up to be sent to Germany for forced labor. He tries to flee, but is caught at the border with Switzerland and brought back to Prague to face interrogations. But he escapes from the prisoner transport and goes into hiding. In the end he is betrayed by an informer and again arrested. Escaped prisoners are usually killed after recapture. However, he is brought back to Prague for more interrogations by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the frightful Small Fortress prison to be worked to death. He falls sick; the end is fast approaching . But then a miracle happens. He is suddenly transferred to a cushy job. Why? He doesn't know. His sister even gets permission to visit him, an unheard of privilege. The end of war is approaching. He is spared from the last murderous excesses of the SS guards. He doesn't get infected by the raging typhus epidemic and is given a puzzling message by the second highest prison official just before the arrival of the Red Army. Martin returns to Prague just in time to witness the excesses of the street mobs against the remaining Germans and their collaborators. He realizes with disgust that base instincts are not characteristic of only one nation. Eventually, some months after the end of the war he discovers the background of the riddle of why he was rescued from the unmerciful fate of an individual whose future could have only been death. Martin is unhappy with the postwar political events in the country. He fears a Communist takeover and wangles an assignment as correspondent for the press agency in which he works inorder to defect. But before he can arrange it, he is recalled back to Prague just in time for the Communist putsch. He decides without delay to escape on skis over the mountains and at last reaches the West for good. This book is not simply an autobiography. Martin, the realist with a pronounced sense of humor, dissects the history of those dark years in which he was an involuntary participant, often in the perspective of his own experience, and on occasion simply as an observer. His style is factual and dry avoiding sentimentality. It is a story of an apolitical, fun-loving person who is grabbed out of his self-made niche and almost loses his life.

    Her unique ability to passionately transformdiverse subject matters into poetic language is revealed in this important collection of translated pieces. Her play with language is effective and at times transformative, as it expresses and exposes dangerous stereotypes and messages hiddenin the everyday use oflanguage and human behavior. Here, her readers will be surprised and frequentlyconfronted with Ayim's keen and powerful observationsof the complexities of life and the compelling richness of humor and irony within them."These poems [have] passion and irony and always a strong magnetic force...for even her humor, her playing with words and her punch lines never veil the strength of her protest against racism, sexism, and all the other isms that add sadness to our society. In May's voice, I found the echo of other sounds fromthe diaspora. Her unrestrainedness, her humor and lyric expressiveness equal those of Lion-Gontron Damas, one of the fathers of Negritude....An extraordinary voice.Unique and already in the hearts of all of us that are persecuted and fullof thirst."--Maryse Condi, from the introduction to the German edition.

    This collection presents the most accurate translations available of Schnitzler's works, passing up opportunities to paraphrase and instead flushing out vivid detail and psychological insight by combining a sensitive interpretation of the playwright's sometimes ironic, sometimes farcical, temperament with a faithful re-creation of dialogue.The volume includes Schnitzler's popular Roundelay (La Ronde) and Anatol, as well as rarely translated works like Professor Bernhardi and Hour of Realizing. There are also additional scenes and an alternate ending to Anatol that are seldom found in translation or even in German versions of the play. With conscientious attention to the rhythms of speech and respect for the completeness of the works, these translations offer new possibilities for bringing Schnitzler's works to the contemporary stage and new insights for anyone interested in drama, literature, or history.

    Hidden is Faiga and Luzer’s story, a memoir whose intimate and quiet particularity makes the incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust immediate, human, and devastatingly real.In alternating first-person narratives, Faiga (Fay) and Luzer (Leo) take readers into their very different but inextricably linked experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Faiga, the once-dignified young lady from a good home with servants and a seat by the eastern wall of the synagogue, spends two years wandering the perilous countryside, hoping to be taken for a peasant. Mere miles away, knowing nothing of his sister’s fate, Luzer, the leather wholesaler’s only son, lies silent all day in the stifling dark corner of a barn, where the smell of the cows’ warm hides are a piquant reminder of his lost world. Hidden deftly summons that world, as the familiar comforts and squabbles of life in a well-to-do, religious Jewish family are slowly overwhelmed by the grim news coming out of Germany. We follow Faiga and Luzer through the early forebodings and deprivations of the war, into hiding among righteous Poles and erstwhile neighbors-turned-betrayers, and finally, at war’s end, back once more into the world—but not necessarily into safety. Told in a confident, clear, and unsentimental prose, this is a story of heroism and tragedy writ large and small, of two young people coming of age in a world in chaos and then trying to return to "normal" after experiences as unimaginable as they are unforgettable.