Benjamin's Crossing

Benjamin's Crossing - Paperback

$16.95
$16.95
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Benjamin's Crossing
  • Benjamin's Crossing
Benjamin's Crossing - Paperback

Benjamin's Crossing - Paperback

by Jay Parini
$16.95
$16.95

Book Overview

The acclaimed and now-classic biographical novel of Walter Benjamin's last days--adapted into screenplay by Jay Parini.

It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin--the German-Jewish critic and philosopher--has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America.
Beloved biographical novelist Jay Parini's thrilling tale of escape is beautifully interwoven with vignettes of Benjamin's complex, cosmopolitan past: his privileged childhood in Berlin, his years with the German Youth Movement, his university days. His close friendship with Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, and many other well-known artists and intellectuals who were part of Benjamin's intimate circle between the two world wars. Part tragedy, part dark comedy, this sharply realized historical novel tells one of the great and most moving peripheral stories of the Holocaust.
ISBN9780525562757
Author Jay Parini
PublisherAnchor Books
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedFebruary 2021
LanguageENG- English
Pages416
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Fiction Historical Fiction Jewish Fiction Literary

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About Jay Parini

JAY PARINI, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. His novels include The Apprentice Lover and Benjamin's Crossing. His fifth volume of poetry was The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (2005). He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner, in addition to such nonfiction works as The Art of Teaching (2005), Why Poetry Matters (2008), and Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008). Parini's reviews and essays appear frequently in major periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian. He lives in Vermont.

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