cover image Don Quixote in Exile

Don Quixote in Exile

Peter Furst. Northwestern University Press, $64 (209pp) ISBN 978-0-8101-1447-0

Starting with the epigraph ""Humor is but an amiable form of despair,"" Furst narrates in buoyant episodes the story of his life prior to emigrating to the United States. The result is an autobiographical novel of exceptional power. Journalist, Jew and part of prewar Western Europe's coffeehouse intelligentsia, Furst opts out of Hitler's Germany in 1934, going first to Madrid and Vienna, then fleeing Europe altogether with his Viennese bride, Gretl, who plays Sancho to his Quixote. They sail to the Caribbean but, as refugees, are turned away at every port. In Santo Domingo, where they have been offered employment on a farm, their benefactors turn out to be opportunists who have refugees do what no one else will: clean pigsties, poison rats, collect debts at gunpoint. From all this the Fursts exit laughing, but in time the laughter turns hollow, revealing a crueler form of despair. Exile means detachment--from country, history, loved ones, self--and this detachment here breeds an exultant wit. Peter and Gretl are blithe amid adversity, debonair in defeat. Yet behind the gaiety there is a growing sense of loss--the loss of hopeful love, of the Europe Gretl represents and, though unmentioned, of the Jews who stayed behind. This is a brilliant, funny, unsentimental, deeply ironic work. (June)