A Czech writer who immigrated to the United States, Arnost Lustig dislikes the term "Holocaust" because of its "burnt offering" meaning, as he makes clear in Krásné zelené oci (2000; translated as Lovely Green Eyes, 2001) and in articles and interviews. Yet, apart from Milácek (Darling, 1969) and an earlier love story, Bílé brízy na podzim (White Birches in Autumn, 1966), the Holocaust has been the subject of Lustig's writing ever since his first collection of short stories, Noc a nadeje (1958; translated as Night and Hope, 1962).

Born on 21 December 1926 into a comfortable middle-class family in Prague, Lustig was unable to complete his secondary education when the occupying Germans in 1939 banned Jews from schools. He became an apprentice tailor and worked in a leather-goods factory before being sent to the ghetto of Theresienstadt in 1942; there, he first began to read literature. In...