NEW BOOK

A Short Stop on The Road from Auschwitz: Winner of the August Prize 2012, published in Norwegian (Forlaget Press), Danish (Tiderne Skifter), German (Ein kurzer Aufenthalt, Rowoht), forthcoming in Polish, (Czarne), English (Granta and The Other Press), Netherlands (Atlas), France (du Seuil), Italy (Ponte alle Grazie),Hebrew (Yedioth Aharonoth), Finland (Atena).

An exploration of memory; the memory of a child; the memory of a father; the memory of a place and time. The place is a small industrial town in Sweden. The time is post-war. The father has survived the ghetto of Lodz and Auschwitz and the slave camps and the death transports and is transferred to Sweden by the Red Cross in the summer of 1945. The author is the child travelling in his father’s footsteps, talking to him, walking with him, remembering and chronicling his strenuous efforts to make a new life in a new world. The author is the child conquering this world and making it his own. The father is the survivor who begins the world anew in the deepening shadows of a world that is no more. Too soon a chasm opens between the world of the child and the world of the father. The world of shadows invade the world of optimism, progress and collective oblivion.
“The place where I make the world into mine, is also the place where the world turns its back on you, which is also the place where you finally turn your back on the world.”

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntags-Zeitung März 2013:
Rosenberg schreibt in eine einfache Sprache, so schnörkellos und schlicht wie skandinavisches Design. Seine Sätze sind von einer bestehenden Klarheit, durch Wiederholungen erreicht er eine gewisse Elegie, ein sehnsuchtsvoll bedauernde Grundmelodie, die das Buch zu mehr macht als „nur“ der Überlebensgeschichte seines Vaters: nämlich zu großer Literatur. Mitunter ist sein Buch auch von einer bösen Traurigkeit durchzogen, einem beißenden Witz, die sich an den Ungerechtigkeiten, die seinem Vater widerfahren sind, festbeißt und nicht lockerlässt, bis er sie dekonstruiert hat und in aller ihrer Widerwärtigkeit entblößt.

IN TRANSLATION

Wieder im Ghetto. A German translation of the newly written epilogue for the third Swedish edition of my book on Israel, The Lost Land (Det förlorade landet, Das Verlorene Land) has been published by German Lettre International. A full translation in English is published by Eurozine.