FICTION / JEWISH STUDIES / WOMEN'S STUDIES

A JEWISH MOTHER FROM BERLIN and SUSANNA

The voice of Gertrud Kolmar, a gifted writer of prewar Germany, was tragically silenced when she died at the hands of the Nazis. She left behind more than 500 poems on which her well-deserved reputation has rested; however, her two prose works have been virtually unknown to English readers—until now.

In A Jewish Mother from Berlin, desperate to find the man who raped her five-year-old daughter, Martha Jadassohn scours Berlin, traversing the staid and seamy landscapes of this darkly vivid metropolis—world peopled with working-class weekend gardeners, middle-class cultural snobs, and transvestites.

The protagonist of the lyrical Susanna offers a look at the tragedy of the misfit amid convention and conformity. The ethereally beautiful Susanna sets out on a search for her lost lover, only to find herself floundering in a world where everyone's perceptions clash with her own.

Gertrud Kolmar was born in 1894 in Berlin and disappeared on the last transport to Auschwitz in February 1943. Her cousin, Walter Benjamin, professed admiration for her writings, and he was one of only a handful of people with whom she shared her unpublished work.

"Kolmar explores alienation and misfortune with a vivid, emotionally piercing force; here maternal love, devotion and innocence become not refuges from tragedy but lightning rods that seem to attract it."
—New York Times Book Review

"The dark power and haunting beauty of Kolmar's poetry speak in the pages of A Jewish Mother form Berlin and Susanna. This English translation will, one hopes, allow the secret of Kolmar's genius to give way to a celebration of the works she wrote, sorrow at the works unwritten."
—Rebecca Goldstein

"Slowly paced and intensely emotional, both stories effectively forecast the devastation of the holocaust soon to come."
—Kirkus Reviews