Research Catalog

Title

Transit / by Anna Seghers ; introduction by Peter Conrad ; translated by Margot Dembo ; afterword by Heinrich Bøll.

Author

Seghers, Anna, 1900-1983

Publication

New York : New York Review Books, ©2013.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Dembo, Margot Bettauer

Description

xv, 257 pages; 21 cm.

Summary

"Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers's multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel{u2019}s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator{u2019}s "deathly boredom," bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers."--Page 4 of cover.

Series Statement

New York Review Books Classics

Uniform Title

Transit. English

Alternative Title

Transit.

Subject

• 1939-1945
• World War, 1939-1945 > Refugees > Fiction
• Marseille (France) > Fiction

Genre/Form

• Fiction
• Fiction.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

ISBN

• 9781590176252 (alk. paper)
• 1590176251 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2012044953

OCLC

• 807024543
• SCSB-11071944

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library