Sepharad

Book excerpt: An “amazing” novel about the diaspora of Sephardic Jews amid the tumult of twentieth century history (The Washington Post Book World). From one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, this extraordinary blend of fiction, history, and memoir tells the story of the Sephardic diaspora through seventeen interlinked chapters. “If Balzac wrote The Human Comedy, [Antonio] Muñoz Molina has written the adventure of exile, solitude, and memory,” Arturo Pérez-Reverte observed of this “masterpiece” that shifts seamlessly from the past to the present along the escape routes employed by Sephardic Jews across countries and continents as they fled Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s purges in the mid-twentieth century (The New York Review of Books). In a remarkable display of narrative dexterity, Muñoz Molina fashions a “rich and complex story” out of the experiences of people both real and imagined: Eugenia Ginzburg and Greta Buber-Neumann, one on a train to the gulag, the other heading toward a Nazi concentration camp; a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small Spanish town; and Primo Levi, bound for Auschwitz (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel). From the well-known to the virtually unknown, all of Muñoz Molina’s characters are voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting. “Stories that vibrate beneath the burden of history, that lift with the breath of human life.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “A magnificent novel about the iniquity and horror of fanaticism, and especially the human being’s indestructible spirit.” —Mario Vargas Llosa “Moving and often astonishing.” —The New York Times