Pogroms

Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better covers for those who like horses – as the 23-year-old Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, which sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in Germany and Switzerland last year. ‘A truly great writer steps onto the stage,’ trumpets Daniel Kehlmann, who is no stranger to great writing: his latest novel, The Director, is on the International Booker Prize longlist. To Patti Smith, Biedermann is ‘gifted’. He is also a scion of the eponymous Lázárs, an aristocratic Hungarian family, making this first foray into fiction a personal project. The narrative spans the

‘Nothing escape’s the wolf’s fangs,’ thinks the narrator of Katerina. Through an outlandish sequence of chances and choices, somehow its author did just that. Aharon Appelfeld, a child of assimilated parents, lived in the old Jewish heartland of Bukovina. In 1940, short-lived Soviet occupation gave way to Nazi control. His mother was murdered and his father disappeared. Young Aharon escaped the Czernowitz ghetto and survived as a wild child in the forests, sheltered by a village prostitute, then as the ‘slave’ of a Ukrainian bandit gang. When the Red Army arrived he cooked for them before, via a peril-strewn route through Italy, he migrated to Mandate Palestine. In newborn Israel