Seventh Well

( 1 )

All Available Formats + Editions

$1.98

$13.95

Paperback

$1.98

$13.95

The Seventh Well (Reprint) Pub. Date: 12/15/2008 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

$2.00

——

The Seventh Well Pub. Date: 1/1/1977 Publisher: International Publishers Company, Incorporated
$0.01

$23.11

Hardcover

$0.01

$23.11

Seventh Well Pub. Date: 12/10/2007 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

Want to read this on your NOOK? Request as NOOK Book from the publisher

Thank you for requesting this book as a NOOK book from the publisher.

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

Advertising

Overview

He grew up on the street, a high school dropout. In 1938 he left his mother and sister behind in Vienna and fled on foot to France, where later he was put on a train to Auschwitz. Transported from camp to camp, Fred Wander was haunted for twenty-five years by the crystalline, episodic stories that chronicle the plight of his fellow inmates. Only after the tragic death of his little daughter did these voices pour forth. The result was this novel, published in East Germany in 1970. Finally it appears in English in this masterful translation, its haunting cadences evoking Levi and Celan, its backstory as heartrending as Suite Française. Wander demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise. The Seventh Well, named after the well of truth, recalls Dante's Inferno with its mesmerizing descent into evil. Its existence is a miracle.

Editorial Reviews

Jascha Hoffman

The Seventh Well [is] a novel narrated by a young man who attempts to maintain his own sanity in the death camps by immersing himself in the lives of his fellow prisoners. Originally published in 1971, it is now available in a superb new translation by Michael Hofmann. Wander does not guide the reader on his own journey from boxcar to barbed wire, as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi have done. Rather, his anonymous narrator undergoes a sort of spiritual education as he studies the doomed men and boys around him. The result is an indirect portrait of a man trying to grasp an unthinkable trauma.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

An Austrian Jew and photojournalist who was interned at 20 different Nazi camps between 1939 and 1945, Wander (1917-2006) first published this loosely structured novel in East Germany in 1970. Spare, haunting anecdotes memorialize Jews who died senseless, undignified deaths in Nazi concentration camps. In the Hirschberg camp, Mendel Teichmann, a 50-year-old atheist, keeps the other prisoners occupied with his wry tales; a Polish boy, Yossl, freezes after guards taunt him and shovel snow over him. While most prisoners gulp down their meager rations, the narrator describes how "men like Pechmann... turn a crust of bread into a seven-course meal." On the eve of Buchenwald's liberation, the narrator watches Joschko, 10, patiently push food into his exhausted younger brother. The book is much more than a catalogue of horrors and of courage, as Wanders's narrator struggles to find the language to describe what he has seenn. This is a worthy addition to Shoah literature. (Dec.)

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

Library Journal

Wander, who was born in Vienna and died in 2006, has crafted a series of tales that make up this novel based on his experiences in such German camps as Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Although the stories may at first seem disconnected, they form a clear picture of the camp experience. Wander brings his characters harrowingly alive, in most cases right before their deaths. Grim as it may sound, the book is a poetic meditation on human existence under unbelievable circumstances, effectively translated by Hoffman. It is remarkable that beauty can come out of such horror. A map is provided showing the actual paths of the forced marches that took the author and so many others from one infamous Nazi detention site to the next. Originally published to little attention in East Germany in 1971 where Wander was living, it was republished in a reunited Germany in 2005. The ennobling account of this witness deserves the widest audience. [See Prepub Alert, LJ8/07.]
—Edward Cone

Kirkus Reviews

The experiences of Galician Holocaust survivor Wander, who died in 2006, are starkly fictionalized in this lyrical novel originally published in East Germany in 1970. The episodic narrative chronicles hardship and an endangered culture's communal will to survive. It is presented by an unnamed narrator who honors his comrades in suffering by describing their ordeals and retelling their stories. Wander's resonant title, taken from a 16th-century poem by Rabbi Loew of Prague, offers an image of unshakeable faith-as do the prisoners whom we encounter at Auschwitz, during an arduous mountain crossing in flight from the Nazis' enemies, and at Buchenwald-where the first things the arriving prisoners see are "stacks" of dead bodies. The details may be (alas) familiar, but their cumulative power is considerable. Comparisons to both classic concentration-camp memoirs and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich are as justly earned as they are inevitable. Among the most memorable of the narrator's companions: "storyteller" Mendel Teichmann, an ironical atheist who nevertheless confirms his hearers' stubborn hopefulness indomitable; "Parisian laborer and resistance fighter" Jacques; rich farmer Meir Bernstein, who stoically refuses to believe that everything will be taken from him; and teenaged Tadeusz Moll, who eventually runs out of the astonishing good luck that had magically attached to him. A slight tendency toward sentimental oversimplification is effectively balanced by Wander's gift for understatement (wonderfully rendered by Hofmann's beautiful translation). And no reader will be unmoved by lucid homespun metaphors (e.g., "Mornings when a sun comes up bloody as out ofa battle") or such scenes as a "demonstration against barbarism" accomplished by "educated" prisoners discussing favorite literary works. A story we cannot hear too many times is grippingly retold in this blistering report from hell on earth. Wander's legacy thus becomes a gift bequeathed to all of us.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393065381
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 12/10/2007
Pages: 192
Sales rank: 1,036,115
Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Liberated at Buchenwald in 1945, Fred Wander was born in Vienna in 1916, where he died in 2006.

For his translations, acclaimed poet Michael Hofmann has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Dublin International IMPAC Award, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and The Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times). He is the highly acclaimed translator of, among others, Kafka, Brecht, and Joseph Roth.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 2

( 1 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(1)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines

Tell the world what you think of this product.

Add Recommendations

Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

- HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
- Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
- Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
- Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
- Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
- Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
- Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
- See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.

Anonymous

Posted August 12, 2010

No text was provided for this review.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble

Seventh Well

Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

Jascha Hoffman

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

Meet the Author

Customer Reviews

Rating Distribution

5 Star

4 Star

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

What to exclude from your review:

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

Reminder:

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!