Book presentation: Luis S. Krausz „Deserto. Zwischen den Welten“
In search of the world of yesterday, the first-person narrator, who only knows Europe from hearsay, travels with a group of Jewish Brazilian youth to a kibbutz in Israel in the 1970s to learn something about the history of his ancestors and the country. Despite the Zionist travel organization’s strict ban on leaving Israel, he makes an “excursion” to relatives who found refuge from the Nazis in London at that time. Europe literally becomes a myth-enshrouded continent, the dream of a bygone time for the young protagonist. His grandparents, who originated from Vienna, had already emigrated to South America in the 1920s. They were able to establish themselves in Brazil and build up a new existence there. The family is widely scattered; several relatives live in Israel, others in England. But all of them are full of wistfulness about the good old days, full of homesickness for a Central Europe that now only remains in memory.
Luis S. Krausz leads his readers through the complex story of a German-speaking Jewish family, strewn across the continents, whose home before the war was Austria and Germany. Still feeling as belonging to Central European culture, they are not really at home anywhere, neither in Israel, nor Great Britain, nor Brazil. Just like the desert is a place between two worlds in the Bible, the situation of these émigrés is thus a constant state of in-betweenness: shaped by the impossibility of finding a new homeland and of returning to the old one.
Luis S. Krausz was born in 1961 as the child of exiled Jews in São Paulo. His grandparents emigrated in the 1920s from Vienna to São Paulo. The trauma of exile let them construct a world that no longer corresponded to Europe, but also never arrived in Brazil. Luis S. Krausz is a writer and translator of Joseph Roth and Elfriede Jelinek, among others, as well as Professor for Jewish Literature at the Universidade de São Paulo. Numerous publications on German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish literature. He was awarded the Prêmio Benvirá de Literatura for his novel „Deserto.“
Reading from „Deserto“ (in Portuguese and German)
Conversation (in German) with Luis S. Krausz
Presentation and conversation: Dieter Bandhauer, Publisher
An event in the scope of the Brazilian Literature Week
Advanced booking requested: Tel.: +43 1 535 04 31-110 or e-mail: events@jmw.at.
Free admission as of 6:45 p.m.
Photo (c) Sonderzahl Verlagsges.
