Fuck+America+by+Edgar+Hilsenrath

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=Book Summary= In the emigrants' café on the corner of Broadway and 86th Street in New York, the German Jew Jakob Bronsky sits writing his autobiographical novel //The Wanker// night after night. He makes a living waiting tables, washing dishes, and doing other odd jobs, his everyday life consisting of a permanent struggle for hot meals, a roof over his head, a bus ticket. His 'confession' beginning with the motto **Fuck America** is a wicked satire on the false promises of a hypocritical society and a bitter résumé of the Jewish fate. A shocking confessional and a fascinating document of contemporary history, this is Hilsenrath's requital of 1950s America. His novel's hero, the semi-fictitious and semi-autobiographical Jewish immigrant Jakob Bronsky, experiences the land of opportunity from the perspective of a hobo. Bronsky's search for a woman leads to traumatic obsessions and macabre rushes of fantasies: poetic elements, blunt realism, obscenity and wicked humour come together in a deeply moving collage. Reading the book today, it is immediately associatied with the current situation of emigrants all over the world. With his humour and his literature, Hilsenrath managed to save himself. In //Fuck Amerika//, he recreates with sarcasm his emigration and his experiences in the New York of the fifties. - //EL PAIS//

== =About the Author= Edgar Hilsenrath is a survivor of the Jewish holocaust. Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1926, he was later taken to Romania by his family to escape Nazi persecution, but he was then deported to the Ukraine and sent to a concentration camp. After liberation he went to Palestine on one of the first refugee trains. Hilsenrath subsequently lived in France and the United States and now lives in Berlin. His work – translated in almost thirty countries – has been recognized through the most distinguished literary awards, amongst them the //Lion-Feuchtwanger Prize// of the //Academy of the Arts// in Berlin. In 2009 he has been honoured with the Prix Mémorables awarded by the Association of Independent Booksellers in France, for his novel //Fuck America//.