Levy’s Testament

They meet in Berlin but in London they become a couple. They spend their days in a court room at the Old Bailey, to support anarchists facing draconian prison sentences. Strikes, squatting, IRA attacks and the tough measures taken by the government shape everyday life in the winter of 1972. The couple explore the city, floating through it weightlessly as though in a dream. The Englishman (as the narrator calls her companion) knows little about his Jewish family. Decades later, after they have already been separated for many years, the Englishman uncovers a family drama. It takes him back to the Old Bailey: to 1924, to a spectacular fraud case, in which the accused is Levy, his great-grandfather.

Following the restless search of her companion, encouraging it with her questions, the narrator stumbles upon the inscrutable workings of history, which connects the remotest episodes of our life. Their quiet, prosaic, adamant sound is what makes Ulrike Edschmid’s novels unique. In Levy’s Testament the lover turns into a chronicler and the intimacy of emotion into an instrument of cognizance.

»Her books are slim volumes. But they have an enormous impact.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»You won't want to put this slim, intense book down until the very last page ...« Christoph Schröder, ZEIT Online

»Edschmid works with the suggestive power of historical indices, her style combines reportage and fiction. The constant shifts between present tense and past tense create a special kind of hyper-realistic perception that does justice to the individual case and yet goes far beyond it.« Meike Fessmann, Der Tagesspiegel

»Thanks to Edschmid's intense but sober narration, the 49 episodes appear before the reader’s eyes like film stills.« Christoph Schröder, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Page by page the story keeps getting more and more fascinating.« Hannah Bethke, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Levy's Testament is a moving book in which Ulrike Edschmid tells a biography whose importance transcends the individual with great sensitivity.« Fokke Joel, neues deutschland

»A memoir that maintains a distance to reality and gets under the reader’s skin.« BÜCHERmagazin