Hermann Grab, like Franz Kafka, was a ’Prague Jew’, part of a German-speaking group of great cultural importance. As a Jew Grab was forced to leave Prague and emigrated to the United States were seven of the eleven pieces in this book are set.

In one of the American stories Wedding in Brooklyn he captures the unsettled awkward world of those whose settled, established lives in Prague, Vienna or Berlin were thrown on the table like so many dice. They were then doomed to try to eke out a living, starting from scratch in their forties or fifties, in a foreign country. And these of course were the lucky ones! Just one of the many crimes on the chargesheet of the Germans under Hitler was the virtual crippling of European intellectual life as a result of their domination of Central and Eastern Europe.

In the title piece, a novella, we discover quite what a loss Hermann Grab’s exile was to literature in German. His writerly gift is immediately apparent as the young boy passes through early morning city streets: ’Renato would notice how one or other of the shop windows would already be illuminated at that hour, thereby transplanting an interior into the midst of the cold streets’. There is a powerful visual imagination here that recalls the master, Proust, especially as this is a story of childhood and youth constructed from memories of school (where reigned the quirky Dr. Wanka) and Mama (’Visiting Mama in her bedroom, Renato would look at the elongated glass drops which were always just on the point of falling from the chandelier’). With the other stories in the section ’Early Tales’ there is a wonderful evocation of the atmosphere of Austria-Hungary (of which Prague was a part) in its last years before 1918.

Whether reminiscence unfolded out of the unforced logic of childhood or the intelligent naïveté of adolescent thwarted love — ’I probably am fond of her, he declared and immediately reflected how strangely it was arranged that one was fond of people who seemed quite indifferent to one.’ — Grab is strange, original and striking.

He can also be tender and humorous as in The Lawyer’s Office which, set in Prague between 1920 and 1938, evokes in the petty existence of minor office staff a vivid human world, just like our own with its office politics, lonely people and claustrophobia; but different in that by the end of the story Jewish or Communist employees are starting to disappear into thin air...

The Nazis tried to write Grab and his fellows out of history so congratulations to the small transatlantic publishing house (Verso) that has restored this excellent writer to the English-speaking world and the present day.

’Her betrothed sometimes remained away over a Sunday. Then Fräulein Lange would ask whether Fräulein Kleinert would like to spend the afternoon with her. They would go to a picture theatre, to a promenade concert or to the big pastry shop. Here they would sit at one of the little gilt tables with their princely ornamentation and, when they had consumed the plump doughnuts with coffee-flavoured or chocolate icing and scraped up every last remnant of whipped cream from their plates, they would watch the families slowly endeavouring to forge a way between the close-packed tables, they would see the Sunday bustle of the waitresses, the impassive faces of the customers who had found a place and the cigarette smoke which hung in the teatime air. Fräulein Lange always spoke only about her betrothed and his dazzling prospects and, if he were not travelling, Fräulein Kleinert would say she was quite content on a Sunday afternoon to alter a dress, brush her carpet or rearrange her cupboards. In her room in the high-lying suburb, which afforded her fresh air and also a view over a small children’s playground, she would hear the occasional radio and sometimes piano-playing too, since, like her, a few families in the building would be spending the afternoon at home.’ p149 (from The Lawyer’s Office)

Hermann Grab, like Franz Kafka, was a ‘Prague Jew’, part of a German-speaking group of great cultural importance. As a Jew Grab was forced to leave Prague and emigrated to the United States were seven of the eleven pieces in this book are set.

In one of the American stories Wedding in Brooklyn he captures the unsettled awkward world of those whose settled, established lives in Prague, Vienna or Berlin were thrown on the table like dice. They were then doomed to try to eke out a living, starting from scratch in their forties or fifties, in a foreign country. And these of course were the lucky ones! Just one of the many crimes on the chargesheet of the Germans under Hitler was the virtual crippling of European intellectual life as a result of their domination of Central and Eastern Europe.

In the title piece, a novella, we discover quite what a loss Hermann Grab’s exile was to literature in German. His writerly gift is immediately apparent as the young boy passes through early morning city streets: ‘Renato would notice how one or other of the shop windows would already be illuminated at that hour, thereby transplanting an interior into the midst of the cold streets’. There is a powerful visual imagination here that recalls the master, Proust, especially as this is a story of childhood and youth constructed from memories of school (where reigned the quirky Dr. Wanka) and Mama (‘Visiting Mama in her bedroom, Renato would look at the elongated glass drops which were always just on the point of falling from the chandelier’). With the other stories in the section ‘Early Tales’ there is a wonderful evocation of the atmosphere of Austria-Hungary (of which Prague was a part) in its last years.

Whether reminiscence unfolded out of the unforced logic of childhood or the intelligent naïveté of adolescent thwarted love — ‘I probably am fond of her, he declared and immediately reflected how strangely it was arranged that one was fond of people who seemed quite indifferent to one.’ — Grab is strange, original and striking.

He can also be tender and humorous as in The Lawyer’s Office which, set in Prague between 1920 and 1938, evokes in the petty existence of minor office staff a vivid human world, just like our own with its office politics, lonely people and claustrophobia; but different in that by the end of the story Jewish or Communist employees are starting to disappear into thin air...

The Nazis tried to write Grab and his fellows out of history so congratulations to the small transatlantic publishing house (Verso) that has restored this excellent writer to the English-speaking world and the present day.

‘Her betrothed sometimes remained away over a Sunday. Then Fräulein Lange would ask whether Fräulein Kleinert would like to spend the afternoon with her. They would go to a picture theatre, to a promenade concert or to the big pastry shop. Here they would sit at one of the little gilt tables with their princely ornamentation and, when they had consumed the plump doughnuts with coffee-flavoured or chocolate icing and scraped up every last remnant of whipped cream from their plates, they would watch the families slowly endeavouring to forge a way between the close-packed tables, they would see the Sunday bustle of the waitresses, the impassive faces of the customers who had found a place and the cigarette smoke which hung in the teatime air. Fräulein Lange always spoke only about her betrothed and his dazzling prospects and, if he were not travelling, Fräulein Kleinert would say she was quite content on a Sunday afternoon to alter a dress, brush her carpet or rearrange her cupboards. In her room in the high-lying suburb, which afforded her fresh air and also a view over a small children’s playground, she would hear the occasional radio and sometimes piano-playing too, since, like her, a few families in the building would be spending the afternoon at home.’ p149 (from The Lawyer’s Office)