I was happy to be back on the back page of Maclean’s, where my column used to find its perch, with a contribution to our trademark series of obituaries of people you may not know. I wrote about Hans Eichner, a scholar and very late-blooming novelist. The details are in the obit, but I want to emphasize that I was already reading his extraordinary novel Kahn & Engelmann before I learned Eichner had died, and it is an easy book to recommend. Poignant, often hilarious, and extraordinarily evocative of the vanished Jewish society of Central Europe, it lets us know a rich cast of characters as they try to make their way through a historic cataclysm. I’m left feeling sorry I never got a chance to talk to the author.
I was happy to be back on the back page of Maclean’s, where my column used to find its perch, with a contribution to our trademark series of obituaries of people you may not know. I wrote about Hans Eichner, a scholar and very late-blooming novelist. The details are in the obit, but I want to emphasize that I was already reading his extraordinary novel Kahn & Engelmann before I learned Eichner had died, and it is an easy book to recommend. Poignant, often hilarious, and extraordinarily evocative of the vanished Jewish society of Central Europe, it lets us know a rich cast of characters as they try to make their way through a historic cataclysm. I’m left feeling sorry I never got a chance to talk to the author.