The life of Jewish entertainer Kurt Gerron is a truly extraordinary and unique story, and Lewinsky does it ample justice in this epic novel. Telling the story from the perspective of Gerron, star of stage and screen in the pre-war years, Lewinsky keeps a balance between the gregarious cynicism of Gerron’s legendary stage persona and an unflinching record of the horrific events unfolding around him. In this way, the author succeeds in viewing the Holocaust through a new and startling lens.
Imprisoned in Theresienstadt, Gerron is asked to direct a propaganda film about this ‘paradise ghetto’. He isn’t accustomed to moral reflection and, to avoid the terrible choice he’s been forced to make, he escapes into his memories. With gusto the entertainer recalls his youth, his rise and fall in show business, and the long, cruel sequence of events that have led to his imprisonment. The horrific world of the concentration camp seeks to reduce him to nothing; he needs to remember that he was once someone, starring opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel and premiering ‘Mack the Knife’ in The Threepenny Opera. Eventually, he agrees to make the film, if only to save his wife and the participants in the film from deportation.
Directing, he feels himself once again. But the entire process is full of macabre jokes, which Gerron notes with bitter irony; only, of course, there is nothing funny at all about Theresienstadt. The film is never edited properly, and one day Gerron finds that he has been assigned to a transport: the comedy of his life will reach a horrific end. Gerron’s voice is cynical, wry and warm. Lewinsky has chosen to dispense with the modernist aesthetics often thought appropriate for Holocaust literature in German, instead telling the story in a straightforwardly realist fashion through Gerron’s acerbic voice, which is knowing while also being ignorant of the scale of the genocide around him. As he is tugged back to the reality of his life in the concentration camp again and again, he draws cynical parallels between the scenes of his youth – his snobbish mother, in the trenches, on the stage, performing cabaret in a transit camp – and the bitter absurdities of his current existence. His anecdotes are lively, scurrilous and rambling, and his remarks on Theresienstadt and Nazism perceptive and biting without ever deteriorating into pontification.
A gripping and moving masterpiece.
‘Truly a literary miracle.’– Neue Zürcher Zeitung
‘A love story. Without question. Narrated by Lewinsky as if he were Kurt Gerron, that comedian of banality, standing at the abyss but then growing above and beyond it.’
– Die Welt
‘A wonderful, moving, clever book.’
– Norddeutscher Rundfunk
Рецензия Александра Терехова, лауреата премии "Большая книга", здесь.
Charles Lewinsky: "Gerron", Nagel & Kimche, 2011
About the author
Nadia Sikorsky was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University and went on to complete her postgraduate studies there, earning a PhD in History. She spent 13 years at UNESCO, first in Paris and then in Geneva. After serving as Director of Communications at Green Cross International, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, she launched NashaGazeta.ch in 2007, Switzerland’s first Russian-language online daily newspaper.
In 2022, Nadia Sikorsky was named to Le Temps’ Forum des 100, which brings together individuals who, in the newspaper’s view, have “significantly contributed to the success of French-speaking Switzerland”, from across public life, business, politics, science and culture.
After 18 years at the helm of NashaGazeta.ch, Nadia Sikorsky decided to devote herself to what had always held a special place in her work as a journalist: culture in all its diversity. This led to the creation of Russian Accent, a trilingual cultural blog in Russian, French and English, born in the heart of Europe, in Switzerland, which has become her second home and whose multiculturalism and multilingualism have helped shape the character of this new project.
At the heart of the project is the perspective of a European of Russian origin, drawing on more than 35 years of professional experience and a deep knowledge of both cultural traditions. Nadia Sikorsky sees her role as that of a cultural mediator between the two. The title of the blog, Russian Accent, reflects this idea: the accent is neither a linguistic barrier nor a political position, but a distinctive cultural imprint within a European context.
