The Hooligan's Return

Praise for The Hooligan’s Return

“We know when we’ve come on a work of literature that alters, for the rest of our lives, how we see, how we understand even that which we may have believed we understood before. Primo Levi’s The Drowned and Saved. The Death of Ivan Illyich. Chaim Grade’s My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner. Ward Number Six. And now The Hooligan’s Return. I am profoundly grateful for this living, flesh-and-blood, yet unearthly memoir.”

— Cynthia Ozick

“It is that kaleidoscopic excursion into recent and remote yesterdays that forms the bulk of ‘The Hooligan’s Return,’ peopled with many touching moments and characters. All is recounted with the caustic dexterity and lyrical power we would expect from the accomplished novelist who gave us ‘Compulsory Happiness’ and ‘The Black Envelope.’”

— Ariel Dorfman, New York Times Book Review

“A fascinating, beguiling record of the almost incredible events that can transpire in one life, especially if that life is lived in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. The Hooligan’s Return operates on so many levels that finally it eludes all classifications and reveals itself as art.”

— Francine Prose

“A distinguished writer whose vision of totalitarianism is closer to Kafka’s cloudy menace, universal, and yet internalized, than to Orwell’s brass tacks…. The artistry of the implication, the intensity of what can seem a dream state, draws us imperceptibly through a half-lighted window for lack of the door.”

— Richard Eder, New York Times

“This world of ours, in his view, is a place where the ridiculous reigns supreme over all human life and tortures everyone without respite, and therefore it cannot be ignored because it’s not about to ignore any of us…. He has in mind all those, including himself, who were left to play the fool in one of history’s many traveling circuses.”

— Charles Simic, New York Review of Books