I know I’m early in reviewing my Classics Club Spin book, but it just so happens that when it was picked for the spin, I had just read it but not reviewed it yet. Lucky for me, because so many of the books remaining on my list are really long!
I am not sure how The Passenger made it onto my Classics Club list, but its origins are certainly interesting. Boschwitz, who had already escaped Germany with his mother, was so affected by the events of Kristallnacht that he wrote this novel in a great hurry. It was published in England in 1939 and in the U. S. in 1940, but then it just vanished. Revisions he mailed to his mother never arrived. Then, in 1942, he and his manuscript were on a passenger ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat, and they were lost. Nearly 80 years later, a correspondence with Reuella Shachaf, Boschwitz’s niece, mentioned to Peter Graf that the manuscript for the book was held in an archive of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. So Graf looked it up and helped edit it and get it republished. It came back out in 2018.
The book opens with wealthy Jewish businessman Otto Silbermann handing over 51% of his business to a friend, Becker, to save it from being taken. As Becker points out, there is nothing Silbermann can do about it because he’s Jewish. Jewish men are being rounded up, but Silbermann has an advantage of not looking Jewish.
Back at home with his Christian wife, he tries to sell his house to another friend, Findler, who cheats him. Again, there is nothing he can do about it. Then thugs begin pounding on the front door, so Findler sends him out the back, saying he’ll protect Elfrieda.
Silbermann begins a journey lasting days, traveling by train from one city to another to find a way to escape Germany. His goal is to go to his son Eduardo in Paris. But Eduardo has been unable to get him the papers he needs. In the meantime, he lives in a state of paranoia, listening to constant insults to Jews, fearing strangers, and thinking he’ll be arrested any minute.
This is a tense novel that seems very realistic, although Silbermann occasionally becomes incandescent with anger about the injustice, thereby risking his own life. It’s a compelling novel.
What? Me Read? 
Sounds like a really compelling book with a very interesting history.
It was interesting.
A bit too close to home at the moment with anti-Semitism back on the rise. It sounds compelling but I tend to avoid books on this subject because I find it all too raw. We’ve really learned nothing from history.
That’s true. So, I take it you’re avoiding all of World War II right about now.
Ha, no, I’m fine with reading about the Nazis getting their a** kicked! I meant I avoid books about the Holocaust and the lead up to it.
Oh.
I didn’t know about this book at all, and it sounds very realistic. My mother-in-law was able to escape Vienna with her family not long after Kristalnacht, because her father’s boss decided to help them escape by sending him on a “business trip” with his family to London. Tons of very amazing, scary, and sad stories out there of this era.
I’m so glad she got out. I have another friend who is not Jewish, but her father was in the Polish cavalry, which as you probably know got wiped out. He had made a rendezvous with her mother, but she was unable to get there. He escaped and fought with the Polish air force from England, but she had to stay in Poland for the war. What a terrible time.
I’d never heard of this either… I might need to put it on my future Classics list 🙂 I am currently creating a list full of recommendations 😀
That’s a good idea. I am doing that now in a way, writing down names of authors so far, not specific books.
My list is the name of the recommended classic, the author and a link to know who I have to blame if I don’t like it… hahaha.. though this list is part of my ‘Classic 50 #3’ as I have already created by ‘Classic 50 #2’ and am only 20% through ‘Classic 50 #1’. Lol I think I love lists, especially lists of good books!
It sounds like it.
Oh my the story about the lost transcript is so interesting. Clearly the Nazis intercepted it. Have you read Suite Francais? It also was a book written during the day in the early 1940s by a Jewess who later is captured and killed in a concentration camp. The book wasn’t discovered until 2015, or something close to that time, by a family member looking through old boxes. And there is was in the author’s tiny handwriting.
My spin book <a href=”https://headfullofbooks.blogspot.com/2025/08/classic-review-candide.html“>Candide</a> Well, actually my spin book was Tess of the D’Urbervilles but I had time to read both during this long Spin period and I like my review of Candide better. Ha!
It’s also shorter.
When I added it to my TBR I noted it was only 170ish pages long. Bonus!
Yes, it’s a shorty!