The Emigrants

Is contained in

Canonical title*

De émigrés

Original title

Die Ausgewanderten; Die Ausgewanderten : Vier lange Erzählungen

Alternate titles*

De emigrés : vier geïllustreerde verhalen

Original publication date

1992 (Duits) (Duits); 1993 (Nederlands) (Nederlands)

People/Characters

Narrator; Clara; Dr. Henry Selwyn; Elli Selwyn; Johannes Naegli; Paul Bereyter (show all 13); Lucy Landau; Helen Hollaender; Great-Uncle Ambros Adelwarth; Uncle Kasimir; Aunt Lina; Cosmo Solomon; Max Ferber

Important places

Manchester, England, UK; Hingham, Norfolk, England, UK; Bad Kissingen, Bavaria, Germany; Jerusalem; Deauville, Calvados, Normandy, France; Ithaca, New York, USA (show all 8); Lancashire, England, UK; Norfolk, England, UK

Important events

World War II

Epigraph

And the last remnants memory destroys

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There is mist that no eye can dispel

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My field of corn is but a crop of tears

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They come when night falls to search for life

First words

At the end of september 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.

Quotations

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.

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Such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of... (show all) wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.

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Always before our religion lessons, Paul would always top up to the brim the holy water stoup, embellished with a flaming Sacred Heart that was fixed by the door, using (I often saw him do it) the watering can with which he n... (show all)ormally watered the geraniums. Because of this, the Beneficiary never managed to put the holy water bottle he always carried in his shiny black pigskin briefcase to use. He did not dare simply to tip out the water from the brimful stoup, and so, in his endeavour to account for the seemingly inexhaustible Sacred Heart, he was torn between his suspicion that systematic malice was involved and the intermittent hope that this was a sign from a Higher Place, perhaps indeed a miracle.

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He was an amazingly good whistler; the sound he produced was marvellously rich, exactly like a flute's. And even when he was climbing a mountain, he would with apparent ease whistle whole runs and ties in connected sequence, ... (show all)not just anything, but fine, thoroughly composed passages and melodies that none of us had ever heard before, and which infallibly gave a wrench to my heart whenever, years later, I rediscovered them in a Bellini opera or a Brahms sonata.

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It was not only music, though, that affected Paul in this way; indeed, at any time - in the middle of a lesson, at break, or on one of our outings - he might stop or sit down somewhere, alone and apart from us all, as if he, ... (show all)who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself.

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what he referred to as his condition had been deteriorating in recent years to the point where his claustrophobia made him unable to teach and he saw his pupils, although he had always felt affection for them (he stressed thi... (show all)s), as contemptible and repulsive creatures, the very sigh of whom prompted an utterly groundless violence in him on more than one occasion.

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Three weeks after she arrived, on every visit, she would still be weeping with the joy of reunion, and three weeks before she left she would again be weeping with the pain of separation. If her stay with us was longer than si... (show all)x weeks, there would be a becalmed period in the middle that she would mostly fill with needlework; but if her stay was shorter there were times when one really did not know whether she was in tears because she was at home at long last or because she was already dreading having to leave again.

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Even the least of his reminiscences, which he fetched up very slowly from depths that were evidently unfathomable, was of astounding precision, so that, listening to him, I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had ... (show all)an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.

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They were silent, as the dead usually are when they appear in our dreams, and seemed somewhat downcast and dejected. Generally, in fact, they behaved as if their altered condition, so to speak, were a terrible family secret n... (show all)ot to be revealed under any circumstances.

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He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the g... (show all)rey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.

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He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, no so much because he was convinced that it was finished as... (show all) through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper.

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Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being e... (show all)xperienced - consciousness - and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come.

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I began to fear that I would be condemned to spend the rest of my life amongst the patrons of Kissingen who were in all likelihood preoccupied first and foremost with the state of their bowels.

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I wonder what the three women's names were - Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.

Blurbers

Eder, Richard; Ozick, Cynthia; Dirda, Michael; McGonigle, Thomas; Sontag, Susan

Original language

German