This is a work of fiction. As such, it lays no claim to the kinds of truth one expects to find in works of literary scholarship or conventional biography. Nevertheless, I have stuck close to the bare facts of Walter Benjamin’s life, which is to say that names, dates, and localities are accurately presented, and that the events described in this novel happened pretty much as described.
I began reading Benjamin in 1969, when a friend passed me a copy of Illuminations, which had just been published in the United States. The voice in these unimaginably compressed, enigmatic, suggestive essays stayed with me for years, and I eagerly read most of Benjamin throughout the 1970s, when his work became popular in academic circles. In the mid-1980s, in Italy, I came across a review of Lisa Fittko’s memoir of her wartime experiences in France, and her adventures in leading Benjamin and the Gurlands across the Pyrenees. Almost simultaneously, I discovered Gershom Scholem’s affecting memoir, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. From that point on, this novel seemed inevitable.
In 1989, in Jerusalem, I interviewed many friends and former students of Scholem’s, and began making notes for this novel. I was also lucky enough to meet and interview Lisa Fittko, who has been consistently friendly and helpful throughout the writing of this book; without her sympathy I would not have undertaken this project. Nevertheless, she made me promise that I would say boldly in this afterword that the “Lisa Fittko” who appears in my novel, while based on a real person, is a fictional character, the product of my imagination.
A few secondary sources were of special importance to me in the writing of this book, especially the memoirs of Asja Lacis as well as Benjamin’s own letters (as collected in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodore W. Adorno, 1978) and his Moscow Diary (edited by Gary Smith, 1986). I am also grateful for the critical work on Benjamin by Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Gary Smith, Richard Wolin, Leo Lowenthal, Robert Alter, John McCole, Susan Buck-Morrs, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Bernd Witte.
All passages by Walter Benjamin that are quoted in this novel have been translated by me, in part to give a unity to his voice in English.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Devon Jersild, for her endless encouragement and intellectual companionship, and to express gratitude to Amos Oz and Sir Isaiah Berlin for many friendly conversations, which helped to shape my vision of Walter Benjamin and his world. I am also grateful to the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris for making my time in their library productive and satisfying.