Autobiographies of an Angel

The narrator, an angel, tells two biographies that lie far apart in time and space. One belongs to Johann Klarfeld, a German who lives in the eighteenth century. The other is the story of Berta Józsa, born in 1943, told through the lives of her great-grandparents, grandparents and parents and her own, revealing the fate of a family in Hungary. Beyond a dense web of shared motifs, the two stories are bound into one novel by a pervasive sense of homelessness, by origins kept silent and hidden, by the fear of being branded, and by the anxiety and dread around a Jewish identity that dissolves in forgetting but can never be fully erased.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

234 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Germany, Hungary

First published

2009 by Jelenkor

Author's age

40 when first published

ISBN

9789636764753 (original)

9780300247411 (Yale University Press, United States)