The Jewish Messiah

by Arnon Grunberg

Translated from the original Dutch by Sam Garrett

Arnon Grunberg is one of the most subtly outrageous provocateurs in world literature. The Jewish Messiah, which chronicles the evolution of one Xavier Radek from malcontent grandson of a former SS officer, to Jewish convert, to co- translator of Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Yiddish, to Israeli politician and Israel’s most unlikely prime minister, is his most outrageous work yet. Taking on the most well-guarded pieties and taboos of our age, The Jewish Messiah is both a great love story and a grotesque farce that forces a profound reckoning with the limits of human guilt, cruelty, and suffering. It is without question Arnon Grunberg’s masterpiece.

(From Publisher).

Arnon Grunberg wrote his first novel, Blue Mondays, a European bestseller that won the Anton Wachter Prize for debut fiction, at age twenty-three, and his work has been translated into twenty-one languages. He was born in Amsterdam in 1971, dropped out of school at age seventeen, and started his own publishing company two years later. Two of his novels, Phantom Pain and The Asylum Seeker, won the AKO Literature Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize. In 2002 it became clear that the mysterious Viennese writer Marek van der Jagt, who made his debut with the novel The Story of My Baldness, was Arnon Grunberg. The Story of My Baldness also won the Anton Wachter Prize, making Grunberg the only novelist to have won it twice. Grunberg writes columns, book reviews, and essays for various Dutch and Belgian newspapers and magazines and a blog for the literary magazine Words without Borders. He lives in New York.