The Emigrants

Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber are exiled across a shattered Europe.

Set across Europe and America from the late nineteenth century through the aftermath of the Holocaust, The Emigrants reconstructs lives marked by displacement and loss.

Through photographs discovered in drawers, half-remembered conversations and the slow reconstruction of letters and diaries, The Emigrants pieces together lives fractured by exile. Each man carries a private history of displacement, from pre-war Europe through the rise of Nazism and the shadow of the Holocaust, and each story circles loss that cannot be fully recovered. The narrator’s careful investigations reveal silences, evasions and the quiet weight of trauma that persists long after physical escape.

At first The Emigrants simply documents the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebalds precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.

I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization Susan Sontag

An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art Spectator