ReadRS: The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz.

This is the fictional account of Otto Silberman, a prosperous Jewish businessman who takes flight when brown-shirted thugs pound on the door of his Berlin apartment as the “night of broken glass” – Kristallnacht – is unfolding. Written in the immediate aftermath of the November 1938 pogrom by a 23 year old, it was published to little notice in 1939. (There was kind of a lot going on that year.) Long thought lost, the manuscript was found in a Frankfurt archive and translated a few years ago. You’ve never read anything like it. Either you won’t be able to put it down, or you’ll have to because the tension is too great. It’s vivid and immediate, as if Franz Kafka had rewritten the screenplay to The Fugitive. An eerily prescient portrait of the darkness that was descending on European Jewry.

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