Carole Angier
Home Is Where the Danger Is
Nine Suitcases
By Béla Zsolt
Jonathan Cape 324pp £17.99 (Trans Ladislaus Löb)
VERY, VERY RARELY you read something that knocks the breath out of you. The last book that hit me so hard was Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which exposed the poison that had been brewing in prewar Europe like no other I know. Now this masterpiece does the same for its consequences. I hope it has not come too late; that impatience with the old Jewish Problem and anger at the new one will not stop Bkla Zsolt from taking his rightful place with Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski and Rezzori himself among the supreme artist-historians of twentieth-century evil.
It is only the English version of Nine Suitcases that has taken nearly sixty years to arrive. But the publishing history of the original too was as dogged by bad timing as its author himself. Béla Zsolt was born in 1895, in time for both world wars, and - as a left-liberal journalist and writer, both anti-fascist and anti-communist - for extreme political and racial persecution before, after and in between. He published forty-odd chapters of Nine Suitcases in his weekly journal Haladds ('Progress') in 1946-7; but he never finished it, and never saw it published in book form.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk