DEMBITZER, Salamon. Visas for America. A Story of an Escape.

DEMBITZER, Salamon. Visas for America. A Story of an Escape.DEMBITZER, Salamon. Visas for America. A Story of an Escape. Sydney: Villon Press. [1952.] 8vo. Original cloth with illustrated dust wrappers; pp. [vi], 267, [3 publisher's advertisement for another work by the author]; near fine. Incredibly rare first edition in English, number 23 of "fifty special copies numbered and signed by the Author" (however, this not signed). Translated by E. Baker, revised by E. Bell Smith and with a foreword by Herbert V.

DEMBITZER, Salamon. Visas for America. A Story of an Escape. Sydney: Villon Press. [1952.]

8vo. Original cloth with illustrated dust-wrappers; pp. [vi], 267, [3 publisher's advertisement for another work by the author]; near fine.

Incredibly rare first edition in English, number 23 of "fifty special copies … numbered and signed by the Author" (however, this not signed).

Translated by E. Baker, revised by E. Bell-Smith and with a foreword by Herbert V. Evatt, this is a novel about a Jewish refugee couple escaping last-minute from Nazi-occupied Germany, informed by so many similar real cases in the 1940s. "Because human dignity suffered such damage, one must be eternally vigilant lest mankind is ever again enforced to endure such ultimate misery" (foreword).

"The author and poet Salamon Dembitzer was born in Cracow (Kraków, Poland) in 1888. As a teenager he moved to Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Kassel, where he worked as an editor for the Kasseler Volksblatt. At age 16, some of his poetry was already published. Until the 1930s, Dembitzer worked for several newspapers in Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna, and continued publishing his poems and - starting in 1930 - his novels and dramas. In 1941, he moved to New York and later to Sydney, Australia. In 1958, Salamon Dembitzer moved to Lugano, Switzerland, where he died in 1964" (Leo Baeck Institute, online; they are holding a second edition only). Dembitzer wrote in Yiddish, German, Dutch and English. "This factual report was written down in the year 1941, immediately after the preceding events … [the author] dedicates this book to the memory of those seven million, to his younger brother Chaim Nassyn (Heinrich) Dembitzer, who, with his wife, was captured by the Germans in August, 1942, robbed, tortured and murdered" (Epilogue).

Library Hub locates two copies, which might be the 2nd, trade edition, at Senate House and in the British Library.

SKU: 2118765