Židovský blues – Biller Maxim (2015)

He was born in Prague, moved to Germany at the age of ten, and began studying Germans at seventeen – their books, their women, their mistakes. Biller's autobiographical book captures the tragicomic story of a Jew who becomes a writer in a country where no Jews were supposed to live anymore. Lightly, ironically, and poetically, it tells the story of a man who keeps hearing that he shouldn't insist on being who he is, and who, once he starts writing, cannot be stopped by anyone or anything. Maxim Biller is undoubtedly one of the most open and provocative authors writing in German. He was born in 1960 in Prague to a Russian-Jewish family, emigrated with his parents to Hamburg ten years later, and now lives in Berlin. He studied literature at the universities of Hamburg and Munich and soon began publishing critical and ironic columns in prestigious journals (Tempo, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit). When his short story collection 'When I Am Rich and Dead' was published in 1990, he became one of the respected prose writers in German. His novel 'Esra' (2003) was withdrawn from bookstore shelves and banned based on a court ruling. His penultimate book, 'The Used Jew' (Der gebrauchte Jude; in Czech titled 'Jewish Blues', Labyrint...) received fantastic acclaim.