Mail to the Promised Land
Anna Seghers
1944
Old Levi turned his face away that was so easily stained by tears. Again, he felt a twinge of longing for his terrestrial home. How strange it was, this longing for a miserable land where one had lived through nothing but humiliation and suffering. The blurry faces of the old men who had meanwhile converged around him, drawn to the garden by the…
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Creator Bio
Anna Seghers
Novelist Anna Seghers (born Netty Reiling) was born in Mainz into an affluent family. She attended the University of Heidelberg, obtaining a doctorate in art history in 1924 and writing her dissertation on Rembrandt and Judaism. She began publishing stories and novels as a student, and was an outspoken social activist and anti-Fascist along with her husband Ladislaus Rádványi (1900–1978), a Hungarian Jew. In 1929, Seghers joined the German Communist Party, and became a lifelong member. In 1933, she and her husband were forced to flee to Paris and then to Mexico; she settled in East Berlin in 1947. A committed communist, she received the International Stalin Peace Prize in Moscow in 1952.