Endpapers. Alexander Wolff
ENDPAPERS
Also by Alexander Wolff
The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama
Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure
Raw Recruits (with Armen Keteyian)
ENDPAPERS
A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home
ALEXANDER WOLFF
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2021 by Alexander Wolff
Excerpt from Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell, translation copyright © 2001 by Anthea Bell (Hamish Hamilton 2001, Penguin Books 2002). Used by permission of Random House, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Same excerpt, copyright © The Estate of W. G. Sebald, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Excerpts from “Kurt Wolff Tagebücher, October 23, 1914, to June 28, 1915,” used by permission of Deutsches Literaturarchiv-Marbach.
A portion of this book appeared in different form in Sports Illustrated and on SI.com.
Jacket design by Becca Fox Design
Jacket illustration: Frans Masereel, Holzschnitt aus Le Soleil, 1919
© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in Canada
This book was designed by Norman E. Tuttle of Alpha Design & Composition.
This was set in 11.75-pt. Stempel Garamond LT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-5825-3
eISBN 978-0-8021-5827-7
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
For Frank and Clara,
American, German—
citizens
Every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard? . . . How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?
—W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
CONTENTS
One: Bildung and Books
Two: Done with the War
Three: Technical Boy and the Deposed Sovereign
Four: Mediterranean Refuge
Five: Surrender on Demand
Six: Into a Dark Room
Seven: A Debt for Rescue
Eight: An End with Horror
Nine: Blood and Shame
Ten: Chain Migration
Eleven: Late Evening
Twelve: Second Exile
Thirteen: Schweinenest
Fourteen: Turtle Bay
Fifteen: Mr. Bitte Nicht Ansprechen
Sixteen: Shallow Draft
Seventeen: Play on the Bones of the Dead
Eighteen: The End, Come by Itself
Acknowledgments and Sources
Image Credit
A jab of his elbow, and my father: “It’s like the Gestapo!”
For me, a teenager during the seventies in suburban Rochester, New York, access to what my father called “the Glotzofon” was strictly limited: a sitcom on weekend evenings, a game on Saturday or Sunday, nothing on school nights, until the great exception, that stretch during 1973 when, weekdays in prime time, public television rebroadcast hearings