Erica Fischer Libri

Berlino, 1942. Lilly Wust è una casalinga tedesca un po' conformista, di ventinove anni, rimasta sola a crescere i quattro figli tra le ansie della guerra mentre il marito è al fronte. Nell'allucinata finzione di normalità della Berlino martoriata dalla guerra, Lilly conosce Felice, una ragazza di ventuno anni famelica del mondo e di emozioni, che le porta a casa un turbine di vita e di strani, affascinanti amici. Tra le due donne nasce subito un affetto istintivo, viscerale, destinato a sfociare nella passione. "Aimée" e "Jaguar" si amano, si scambiano lettere e poesie, fanno piani per il futuro, stipulano persino un simbolico contratto di matrimonio. Ma Felice è ebrea e il loro amore doppiamente proibito finirà crudelmente reciso dall'orrore del campo di concentramento di Bergen-Belsen. A cinquant'anni di distanza la scrittrice Erica Fisher ha raccolto l'incredibile testimonianza di Lilly Wust e ha potuto così raccontare la storia vera, tenera e terribile, del coraggioso e tragico amore di Aimée e Jaguar.

Felice Schragenheim (Berlino 1922-Bergen-Belsen 1945), giovane scrittrice e giornalista ebrea, affronta la vita e l'amore con un coraggio e con una lievità che ancora oggi ci sorprendono: si sente protagonista della commedia dell'esistenza e non si lascia intimorire né dalla dittatura nazista né dal pregiudizio benpensante. Sarà proprio questa sua sincerità che la porterà ad affrontare in prima persona, senza risparmiarsi, la tragedia del suo tempo. Questo volume raccoglie, nelle immagini e nelle poesie di Felice e del suo mondo, una testimonianza indimenticabile sulla sua vita e sulla sua vicenda, che ha ispirato il romanzo di Erica Fischer Aimée & Jaguar.

Set in the tumultuous Anglo-Saxon era, the story follows Apsley, a young adopted prince on a quest to discover his true family amidst civil unrest and impending war. As he navigates the challenges of leadership, Apsley strives to unite his fractured country while grappling with his identity and the weight of his responsibilities. The novel explores themes of family, loyalty, and the struggle for peace in a time of conflict.

In July 1940, Erich Fischer found himself in Liverpool being herded onto a British transport ship bound for Australia, along with 2,500 other men. Conditions on board were horrific, with men locked below decks with overflowing latrines and only seawater to clean themselves. Separated from family, friends and removed from any semblance of a normal life, Erich is unsure whether he will ever see wife and child again. Erica Fischer's Over the Ocean tells the extraordinary story of her own parents and at the same time sheds light on a little-known and little-discussed chapter in British history. Fischer's parents met in Austria in the early 1930s. Her mother, Irka, was a Polish Jew and her father, Erich, was a Viennese lapsed Catholic. Faced with growing unrest in Europe, Irka fled to the United Kingdom in 1938, her husband followed a year later. However at the outbreak of war, Erich had been arrested as an 'enemy alien', and having been interned, was deported to the opposite side of the world. Faced with unimaginable hardships, the deportees banded together in solidarity to face their new life in Australia and Erich was, against the odds, able to make contact with Irka and their letters established a lifeline between continents. Over the Ocean is an astonishing true tale dealing with an unexposed and unexplored period in British history but also a story of the resilience of love.

This is the story of two men who first become friends in 1970s New York, of the women in their lives, and of their sons, born the same year. Both Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, and Bill Weschler, a painter, are cultured, decent men, but neither is equipped to deal with what happens to their children - Leo's son drowns when he's 12, while Bill's son Mark grows up to be a delinquent, and the acolyte of a sinister, guru-like artist who spawns murder in his wake. Spanning the hedonism of the eighties and the chill-out nineties, this multi-layered novel combines a plot of mounting menace with a deeply moving account of familial relationships and a superbly observed portrait of an artist, set against the backdrop of a society reaching new depths of depravity in its frenetic quest for the next fashion, drug and thrill.