Read a Book Hitler Hated

There is a story behind the recent publication of Hans Keilson’s Life Goes On.  It was the Jewish author’s first novel, based on his youth and early adulthood in Depression-era Germany.  When the book was published in 1933, Keilson was just 23 years old and finishing medical school.  A year later the Nazi Party banned the book and forbade him to practice medicine.  In 1936, a year after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, Keilson left Germany for the Netherlands, where he lived under a false name and established a pediatric practice.  When the Germans occupied the Netherlands, he joined the Resistance and traveled around the country treating Jewish children who were separated from their parents and living underground.  He wrote two more novels, Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key, both about the war.  Then he stopped—he thought he had no audience—and developed a distinguished career in psychotherapy.  When he was 100 years old, the two wartime novels were rediscovered, translated into English, and deemed masterpieces.  But Life Goes On appeared in English only in 2012.  Keilson, having died in 2011 at the age of 101, did not live to see the translation.