Cozarinsky, Edgardo "Emigre Hotel."

Cozarinsky presents a fascinating intellectual mystery which looks at 20th Century European cultural and ethnic diversity, using the fabled Oct. 1940 Lisbon-New York sailing of the Greek liner NEA HELLAS as the lynch-pin upon which he hangs his enthralling tale. That voyage, from neutral Portugal to still-neutral America, was one of the last regularly scheduled Atlantic sailings during World War 2. For that last voyage the NEA HELLAS’ staterooms, passageways and public rooms were over-filled with many famous European intellectuals, all of whom making a last minute escape from the horrors of Nazism. To an impressive passenger list of such real-life luminaries as Heinrich Mann, Alma Mahler Werfel and Fritz Werfel, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger and Hertha Pauli (“the last scions, emissaries or survivors of European culture in the unconsciously mocking spotlight of a name like NEA HELLAS”), Cozarinsky adds a wealthy young American socialist and her German (possibly) Jewish husband – grandparents of the story’s 1990s narrator. A “Jules and Jim” / “Casablanca” plot line dominates the novella (the narrator’s grandparents had left their best (male) friend behind in Lisbon) as Cozarinsky weaves in and out of 1940 and of the late 1990s, illustrating, as The Times Literary Supplement’s review of Jan. 16, 2004 notes, the “interstices between History and personal history [and] examining the ways that people use, depend on and are trapped by their past.”