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Article: 'Memory Often Strikes Me as a Kind of Dumbness'
- Article from:
- Forward
- Article date:
- December 27, 1996
- Author:
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Iris Dorbian
Forward
12-27-1996
`Memory Often Strikes Me as a Kind of Dumbness'.
By IRIS DORBIAN
An overpowering sense of loss pervades "The Emigrants," W.G. Sebald's haunting fusion of memoir, travelogue and historical commentary. First published in Germany in 1993 and recently translated by Michael Hulse, "The Emigrants" transcends genre, becoming less a biography of four German-born exiles than a stirring elegy to a time and place long since vanished.
Through the prism of a world destroyed by the Holocaust, the passions, hopes and failures of the writer's real-life characters are evoked in rich detail and nuance. Tracing the divergent paths taken by each individual -- an ailing, elderly ...