As its July Book of the Month, the German Book Office in New York has picked Transit by Anna Seghers, translated by Margot Dembo (NYRB Classics, $15.95, 9781590176252).
The GBO described the book, which was finished in 1942, this way: "Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless 27-year-old German narrator of Seghers's multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel's widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator's 'deathly boredom,' bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers."
Anna Seghers (1900-1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She earned a doctorate in art history at the University of Heidelberg in 1924. By 1929, Seghers had joined the Communist Party, given birth to her first child, and received the Kleist Prize for her first novel, The Revolt of the Fisherman. Having settled in France in 1933, Seghers was forced to flee again after the 1940 Nazi invasion. Among Seghers's internationally regarded works are The Seventh Cross (1939); the novella Excursion of the Dead Girls (1945); The Dead Stay Young (1949); and the story collection Benito's Blue (1973).
Margot Bettauer Dembo has translated a variety of books and documentary films and won the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator's Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2003.