Kahn & Engelmann

by Hans Eichner, Jean Snook (Translator)

Overview

The story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary and their immigration to Vienna.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781897231784
Publisher:	Biblioasis
Publication date:	04/30/2009
Series:	Biblioasis International Translation Series , #3
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	504 KB

About the Author

Hans Eichner: Hans Eichner was born in Vienna in 1921 and, being Jewish, escaped to England after the annexation of Austria by Hitler's Germany. He enrolled at the University of London as an extension student in 1943, got a Ph.D. in 1949 and taught German language and literature at Bedford College in London, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Toronto from 1948-1988. He published books on Thomas Mann and Friedrich Schlegel. His novel Kahn&Englemann was first published in German in 2000 and was reprinted in 2002.

Editorial Reviews

Published to critical and commercial success in Europe ten years ago, this debut from prominent Canadian Germanist Eichner is now offered as the third title in the "Biblioasis International Translation" series. Narrated by Peter Engelmann, a middle-aged veterinarian working in Haifa, this work is at once the story of a family and a memorial to Viennese Jews. The narrative, the stream-of-consciousness recollections of a man caught between the need to remember and the desire to forget, opens in both 1980 and 1880 and chronicles the Kahn family's move from rural Hungary to Vienna, the narrator's 1938 flight to Belgium and eventual settlement in Israel, and all the family drama in between. The result is a moving book full of humor and humanity. Appropriate for all readers and essential for those interested in Jewish literature.
—Karen Walton Morse

Library Journal

"This sweeping novel describes in a narrative that is both personal and broad..."—Jewish Book World

"The freedom of the novel form and the use of the narrator’s voice has brought the book to life far more than would have been possible if he had simply recounted these events as they happened."A Common Reader

"Kahn & Engelmann recreates a long-lost way of life. But it also revives a vanished pan-European sensibility. Beautifully written, it may be the last great European novel, a middle-European hybrid of Remembrance of Things Past and Buddenbrooks."—Globe and Mail

"Eichner’s narrative implicates contemporary readers as none of the others can do today by remaining a family saga, complicated by family businesses, messy divorces, rivalries, disputes, suicides, success and failure, all of it compelling to anyone with a family."Geist

From the Publisher