SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Taken Over by Dead Men's Ghosts.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (27 October 1996): 2.

In the following review, Eder offers praise for The Emigrants.

Everything, it seems, is paid for—there is no scot-free; the bill comes around, our dreams send it. The German novelist and scholar W. G. Sebald has written a haunting and limitlessly suggestive book about the most terrible example in our memory.

The Emigrants is four narratives about the death that persists within survival. Each is about a German Jew who in one fashion or another escaped the Holocaust yet gradually succumbed to it years later, in his old age.

The fictional narrator, like Sebald, was born in Germany in 1944, immigrated to Britain and teaches at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The resemblance provides a framework of apparent fact. The narrator's stories—of his Norwich neighbor, a retired doctor who shoots...