SOURCE: Aciman, André. “In the Crevasse.” Commentary 103, no. 6 (June 1997): 61-4.

In the following review, Aciman lauds Sebald's evocation of memory, fate, and the legacy of the Holocaust in The Emigrants.

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany, studied literature there as well as in Switzerland and in Manchester, England, and since 1970 has been teaching at the University of East Anglia, where he is now a professor of European literature. That he and I are both emigrants—a cross of immigrant, exile, and extraterritorial—and that we have both written on the impact of personal as well as acquired memories, and that the question of Jewish suffering lies at the root of our work (though Sebald is not himself Jewish) are coincidences that should have drawn me to his book, which was published in this country late last year and which in literary form combines a variety of fictional...