Title: Thennberg, or, Seeking to go home again
Description: Richard Kranz did not have a happy childhood. Born into a wealthy Jewish Viennese family, he had been a bookish, chubby, lonely boy. The family spent summers in the small Austrian village of Thennberg, where they rented the manor house and where thirteen-year-old Richard had his first sexual experience.

We meet him eight years later as he is released from a nearby concentration camp, a skeleton of a man, filled with thoughts of his recent experiences, of his overheated teen-age sexual preoccupations, of his colorful family, now all gone, and their pathetic efforts to be accepted in a world where Jews are not welcome. He longs for a homecoming, for some connection to his former summer life at Thennberg.

The story takes us to that connection, skillfully moving backward and forward in time, relentlessly pressing toward its tragic conclusion.
Subjects: Austrian fiction, Translations into English