SOURCE: Ozick, Cynthia. “The Posthumous Sublime.” New Republic 215, no. 25 (16 December 1996): 33-8.

In the following review, Ozick praises Sebald's profound and evocative depiction of grief, loss, and German Jewish experience in The Emigrants.

There is almost no clarifying publisher's apparatus surrounding W. G. Sebald's restless, melancholy and (I am almost sorry to say) sublime narrative quartet. One is compelled—ludicrously, clumsily—to settle for that hapless term (what is a “narrative quartet”?) because the very identity of this work remains murky. Which parts of it are memoir, which fiction—and ought it to matter? As for external facticity, we learn from the copyright page that the date of the original German publication is 1993, and that the initials W. G. represent Winfried Georg. A meager paragraph supplies a handful of biographical notes: the author was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany; he studied German language and literature in Freiburg...