Born-Where By Robert Schindel, Translated by Michael Roloff

"Robert Schindel's Born-Where is a novel about origins, about the wages of history. Its protagonists are contemporary Viennese and German Jews who are the children of those who were killed in the German extermination camps. The uneasy intertwining of their lives with contemporary Germans and Austrians constitutes the panoramic epic that the Viennese author unfolds with keen insight and mordant humor. A concentration-camp survivor is summoned back to Vienna to testify at a belated war-crimes trial. On his reluctant return, he meets the past and the present in Austria, making readers aware of how things were and how much of history and of the legacy of racism still lingers on today. The book's wonderfully ironic ending — worthy of Karl Kraus — is set at a filming of a kind of "Schindler's List," where the children of the dead victims of the Holocaust are hired to play the "lambs" in order to reenact the fates of their families.