Fiction. Jewish Studies. "Shhh, murmured my mother. And the first thirteen years of my life vanished into the darkness of that third floor closet." On a July morning in 1942, Raymond Federman's childhood ended, as his parents and two sisters were arrested by collaborationist French police and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, with Raymond alone evading capture. In SHHH, his final novel, Federman reconstructs this childhood out of fragments, speculations, and doubtful recollections--the stories of a lost life, enmeshed with a history that can never be forgotten. "Federman is inarguably one of the most significant vanguard writers of the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first"--Lance Olsen.
Author City: SAN DIEGO, CA USA
Raymond Federman (1928-2009) was one of the most significant fiction writers of recent generations. Federman emigrated to the US in 1947 following the deaths of his mother, father, and two sisters in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. His early experiences in the US included being a American paratrooper in Korea, a saxophone player in Detroit, and a dishwasher and student in Columbia University, before earning a PhD at UCLA and becoming one of the first American critical promoters of the work of Samuel Beckett. Federman taught literature and creative writing at SUNY-Buffalo for 35 years. His numerous experience, exploits, and linguistic inventions have become the basis for nearly than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, translated into German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Swahili. Federman has also been the recipient of numerous awards in the US and abroad, including the American Book Award for Smiles on Washington Square. An important theorist of contemporary writing, Federman always insisted on the integration and inseparability of memory and imagination, fact and fiction. "I have to still believe," he once said in an interview, "as I often do, that one of these days around a street corner I'm going to meet my sisters."
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