SOURCE: Drabelle, Dennis. “What They Left Behind.” Washington Post Book World (15 December 1996): 6.

In the following review, Drabelle praises Sebald's stories in The Emigrants as grim and beautiful.

As best I can tell, this is a collection of four slightly fictionalized narratives, embellished with photographs some of which are culled from family albums and some taken specially for the book. Sorry to be so tentative, but the publisher's promotional material is not very helpful on this score, and in any case the book's genre seems less important than such features as its elegiac tone, its inventive prose, and the affecting composite picture it paints of uprooted German Jews.

W. G. Sebald's subject, then, is not the Holocaust per se but the loss of home suffered by some German Jews (the astute, the ostensibly lucky) in fleeing the increasingly hateful climate that preceded the Final Solution. Each episode is named...