The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

I AM A LATECOMER to Sebald. My close friend the late Geoffrey Hartman, who was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, and died in 2016 near New Haven, Connecticut, introduced me to Sebald in 2002 by kindly giving me a copy of the novel Austerlitz in German. I read Austerlitz and was both moved and upset. It had the same effect on me as reading Primo Levi (1919–87), the Italian Jewish scientist and survivor of Auschwitz.

My initial reaction to Sebald and to Primo Levi was both temperamental and historical. I had grown up in a Yiddish-speaking household. My mother, Paula Lev, came from a small Jewish town near Brest-Litovsk. My father, William Bloom, came from Odessa. They met on Orchard Street in Manhattan, married, and had five children, of whom I was the youngest. All four of my grandparents, many aunts and uncles, and a great many cousins were murdered by the Germans and their Slav helpers in the Shoah. My father was stoic and quiet, but I have many memories of my mother and her sister weeping for their lost family throughout the early 1940s.