Kahn & Engelmann

the long version

"A critical and commercial success in German, Kahn & Engelmann tells the story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary, their immigration to Vienna in the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their loves, business ventures and failings and their eventual tragic destruction, recreating a vanished Vienna with humour and humanity. Travelling, in the words of narrator Peter Engelmann, is "the involuntary national sport of the Jews," and Engelmann does much of it: through snowy woods to escape the Nazis to a new life in England, then on to Australia, Canada and eventually Israel. It is also a novel of faith and its attendant crises, and of the strained relationship of literature to the world. Written by an eminent scholar, himself a survivor of Nazism, Kahn & Engelmann is both an entertaining novel and a major work of Holocaust literature, available for the first time to an English-reading audience."--Jacket.