A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz | Granta

  • Published: 05/11/2015
  • ISBN: 9781783781300
  • 127x20mm
  • 336 pages

A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

Göran Rosenberg

Translated by Sarah Death, John Cullen

On the 2nd of August 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the harrowing slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories.

In this intelligent and deeply moving book, Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father’s story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the long shadows of the past.

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Brilliant and lethal... a profoundly moving act of remembering, but also a searing investigation of complicity, guilt and shame. [His style is] ice-cold, and almost hypnotic in its rhythm and repetitions. Breathtaking

Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

Captivating... This English translation has been prepared with care and intelligence by Sarah Death... A towering and wondrous work about memory and experience, exquisitely crafted, beautifully written, humane, generous, devastating, yet somehow also hopeful

Phillippe Sands, Financial Times

Subtle, chilling, and utterly absorbing, Göran Rosenberg's memoir is also an excavation of a gruelling post-war, too often hidden from history. With a novelist's instinct, Rosenberg travels amongst truths that want to be forgotten - in Poland, in Germany and in Sweden. This is a masterly and moving book that brings the great Sebald to mind

Lisa Appignanesi, author, Losing the Dead

The Author

Göran Rosenberg was born near Stockholm in 1948, the son of two Holocaust survivors. Between 1966 and 1968 he studied at the University of Stockholm, majoring in mathematics, philosophy, political science and journalism. In 1970 he left academia to work as a journalist for Swedish television, radio and print. He has enjoyed a prolific publishing career spanning over two decades, including the highly acclaimed A Personal History of Zionism, Messianism and the State of Israel (1996), which has been translated into six languages, and Reflections on Journalism (2000), which has been translated into Norwegian and Danish. Two of his documentaries have received awards: The Black City with the White House received the Golden Nymph for Best Reportage Documentary at the 1990 International Television Film Festival; and Goethe and Ghetto, which won the Czech Crystal at the International Film Festival in 1996. In 2000 he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa at the University of Gothenberg.

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The Translator

Sarah Death has translated Swedish literature of many periods and genres, including works by Lena Andersson, Kerstin Ekman, Selma Lagerlöf, Astrid Lindgren, Sven Lindqvist, Göran Rosenberg and Steve Sem-Sandberg. Her most recent translation was Letters from Tove, the correspondence of Finland-Swedish author and artist Tove Jansson. She has twice won the George Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish, and in 2014 received the Royal Order of the Polar Star for services to Swedish literature. In autumn 2019, she was partnered with young writer Channa Riedel to participate in the Jewish Book Week/Beit Venezia Writers in Translation Project.

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Göran Rosenberg on Granta.com

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