Edgar Hilsenrath (1926–2018)

Edgar Hilsenrath was born to a Jewish family in Leipzig, Germany, and raised in Halle. His parents were Anna and David Hilsenrath, a furrier. As a young teenager, he knew he wanted to be a novelist. In 1938, to escape the Nazi regime, his father fled to France, and his mother took Edgar and his brother to live with her parents in Siret, Bukovina (present-day Romania). In 1941, after the region was captured by Romanian troops aligned with Nazi Germany and incorporated into Transnistria, the family was confined in the ghetto of Mohyliv-Podilskyi. After the Red Army liberated the ghetto in 1944, Hilsenrath avoided being drafted by them by using forged papers to get on a refugee train bound for the British Mandate of Palestine. There he worked on a kibbutz for nearly three years. In 1947, he was reunited with his family in France. In 1951, he moved to New York City, where he supported himself by working as a waiter and a porter. Most of his novels were autobiographical, satirical, and brutally frank accounts of Holocaust events. He published his debut novel, Night, in English in 1964. It became a huge success in Germany when it appeared there 10 years later. His subsequent books included the provocative The Nazi and the Barber (1971), a worldwide bestseller that made him famous; The Tale of the Last Thought (1989); Jossel Wassermann's Return (1993); The Adventures of Ruben Jablonski (1997); and Terminus Berlin (2006), his last work. After he became a USA citizen and had lived in New York City for 24 years, Hilsenrath returned to Germany in 1975.