WAITING FOR LEAH; TRANS. BY EWALD OSERS.
Publisher: HARVILL PRESS
Published: 2004
Place of publication: LONDON
Language: und; eng
Number of pages: 153
Description: September 1944 in Terez-n, the ghetto created by the Nazis in northern Bohemia as a staging post for the transport of Jews to Poland. The war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their "Final Solution". Rumours are rife among the Jews in the ghetto, even though nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions, or perhaps it is deliberately not believed. Leah, an 18-year-old girl from Holland, has, like most of those around her, given up living in accordance with her beliefs. The narrator is a lad of seventeen, likewise still relatively unaffected by the moral disintegration around him. By chance he encounters Vili Feld, a pre-war acquaintance who had seduced his young girlfriend. Vili takes the narrator to the tiny attic he shares with Leah. Thus begins an erotic entanglement that ends with the narrator and Vili being sent to their deaths in the East.