Rating

★★★★★

Category

literature

Read

2024-08-25

Pages

552

One of the best written books I’ve read this year. Check the opening paragraph:

Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.

Electric. I didn’t even understand half the words (lot of Yiddish terms and slang).

Even the most casual study of the record, Landsman thinks, would show that strange times to be a Jew have almost always been, as well, strange times to be a chicken.