Reunion by Fred Uhlman: the Brilliance of Narrative Economy

“He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again.” A friend in England recommended Reunion by Fred Uhlman and sent the book along for good measure. It is such a slender novella that I started reading it out loud—and found that I could not stop.

How is it that I have never come across this book before? It didn’t get much attention, it seems, when it was published in 1971.

Told retrospectively, the story is about a friendship at once exhilarating and impossible, between the narrator, Hans Schwarz, son of a Jewish doctor, and Konradin von Hohenfels, a young aristocrat. It plays out against a time , the rise of Nazism, that is about to break the world of the narrator in every way possible. Which young person can possibly imagine either of these things?

As his family finds itself hurled into the maelstrom of horrors that was the Holocaust, the story retains its tight focus. I know its terrible truths, but the narrator in the moment of the telling, is tragically unaware of them. You’d think a retrospective voice would be less convincing here but this writer handles the viewpoint with so much grace and skill it feels completely natural.

And what a punch the ending packs! It’s the sort of ending that you can see coming, yet Its impact is indelible.