Reading "Anton the Pigeon Breeder"

On September 7th, 2022, Michael Lehmann, the translator of Bernard Gotfryd's work "Anton der Taubenzüchter" will read in the Villa Ichon in Bremen.

Author and photographer Bernard Gotfryd was born in Poland in 1924 and died in New York in 2016. He himself was deported to various concentration camps and liberated in May 1945. After the war he emigrated to the USA, where he began his career as an author and photographer.

His Anton and the Pigeon Breeder is an alternately outlandish and hopeful collection of eighteen true stories about life during the Holocaust, set in the tranquility of Polish country holidays. Deeply personal and at the same time anchored in world history, Gotfryd's stories paint a picture of the everyday life of the Jewish people in Poland during the Second World War and the aftermath of the Holocaust. Gotfryd describes his work as a photographer in the ghetto, his first love affairs and the difficult time in various concentration camps. His stories often combine the description of the events during the war and their impact on Gotfryd's life several years later. Through these leaps in time, Gotfryd succeeds in connecting the Holocaust with the present and thus, on the one hand, clarifying the relevance of dealing with the war today and, on the other hand, asking himself what it means to survive the Holocaust.

The reading will be accompanied musically by Jan Müller (baritone saxophone) and Gerd Ludwig (double bass).

We are looking forward to a nice evening and hope to see many of you!

Bernard Gotfryd Michael Lehmann