Thennberg, or, Seeking to go home again

Richard Kranz did not have a happy childhood. Born into a wealthy Jewish Viennese family, he had been a bookish, chubby, lonely boy. The family spent summers in the small Austrian village of Thennberg, where they rented the manor house and where thirteen-year-old Richard had his first sexual experience.

We meet him eight years later as he is released from a nearby concentration camp, a skeleton of a man, filled with thoughts of his recent experiences, of his overheated teen-age sexual preoccupations, of his colorful family, now all gone, and their pathetic efforts to be accepted in a world where Jews are not welcome. He longs for a homecoming, for some connection to his former summer life at Thennberg.

The story takes us to that connection, skillfully moving backward and forward in time, relentlessly pressing toward its tragic conclusion.