Fires in the Dark
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4.0 • 1 Bewertung
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- CHF 8.00
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- CHF 8.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
FROM THE WRITER OF BBC SMASH HIT DRAMA CROSSFIRE
'An epic novel ... absorbing, shocking, hopeful.' Mail on Sunday
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Fires in the Dark a breathtaking novel of grand scope which also sheds new light on the Holocaust and its Roma victims.
Yenko is born in 1920s Bohemia to a nomadic Roma family who try to protect him from the hardships imposed on his people. But his childhood world is soon overwhelmed by the Great Depression and the German invasion. Yenko and his parents become fugitives from the Nazis, and ultimately Yenko must decide who and what is worth saving.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British novelist Doughty (Dance with Me) takes Holocaust literature in a new direction with her chronicle of the fates of a nomadic Romany family. Emil, the light-skinned first child of the leader of a Kalderash Roma tribe, is born in 1927, just as "persons of no fixed abode" are being fingerprinted and made to carry identification papers. Raised by the mild, loving Josef and the strong, lovely Anna, Emil knows that the customs of Roma differ from those of gadje (anyone not a Roma), who eat with utensils instead of fingers and send their children to school instead of teaching them how to gut a chicken and raise a shelter. A few years later, he becomes aware of another way in which the Roma are different: the Nazi regime in Germany, bent on ethnic cleansing, is murdering Jews and harassing Gypsies. When he's 15, Emil and his family are incarcerated in a Moravian labor camp. Doughty recounts the horrifying conditions of the camp in unrelenting detail; the only bright moments come with a mad cook's reminiscences about a career selling Hoover vacuums and Emil's budding friendship with Marie, another young Gypsy. Though Emil's father and siblings die, he escapes and makes his way to Prague, where, due to his light skin, he passes as a gadjo. With false papers and a false limp, Emil returns to the camp to rescue his mother, only to discover that everyone has been sent to Auschwitz. Doughty, whose own ancestors were Romany nomads, tells a heartrending tale of individuals struggling against unimaginable horrors, but offers readers a ray of hope at her novel's close.
