Review of “A Thousand Windows” (2026)
by Gerrit Wustmann
Flight, migration and exile are issues that will continue to concern us as long as despots rule states and do not tolerate any opposition to their power politics. That's why people from Syria fled to Europe, that's why people from Ukraine, which was attacked by Russia, came to Germany, and if we allow right-wing extremists to gain power in this country, people will have to flee Germany.
These are topics that concern the writer, who was born in Iran in 1952 and came to Germany at the age of five Nassir Djafari has always moved people, including in his fourth novel “A Thousand Windows”. He has worked in development cooperation for decades - he knows well the reasons why people leave their home countries in the hope of a better life.
This time, however, the protagonist in “A Thousand Windows” is not Iranian but rather Czech. In 1972, a few years after the suppression of the Prague Spring, the reform socialist and journalist Pavel Horak fled from Prague to Frankfurt in the trunk of a Mercedes, at the wheel of which was the Iranian carpet dealer Farhad Behbani, who commuted between freedom and dictatorship with a fake diplomatic passport. A few hours later he is supposed to bring Pavel's wife Jana across the border. But something goes wrong, on the second tour he has another woman with him, who Pavel only catches a glimpse of. Whoever she is, she is not his wife.
From now on, Pavel sits in Frankfurt with a colleague who fled years earlier and wears himself down trying to find his wife, find work, and gain a foothold in exile. When he fell out of favor in Prague, the Soviet favorites first threw him out of the party, then out of his job at the newspaper and continued to harass him until he had to work as a garbage collector. In Germany, Pavel, who is Jewish, has to deal with old Nazis in the authorities, but also with other exiles who help him. Djafari cleverly builds his story, which changes perspective in the middle, away from Pavel and towards his wife Jana, who has remained in Prague, who struggles with the responsibility for her rebellious younger sister, who is afraid of the omnipresent spies and the constant threats of a state apparatus that mercilessly persecutes everyone with whom it perceives contradiction.
“A Thousand Windows” is as complex a story about migration and power structures as it is a fast-paced suspense novel, the potential film adaptation of which is always in mind when reading. And you can't help but feel how similar the methods of repressive systems then and now are and you have to wonder how little has changed at the core when it comes to combating the mechanisms behind them, combating racism and anti-Semitism and all the other evils that still threaten democracies from within today. “A Thousand Windows” tells a story of timeless relevance in clear, stirring prose. Djafari, who began writing late, is an author who desperately needs to be discovered by a wider audience.
(Originalpost can be found on Facebook.)
Nassir Djafari: “A thousand windows”. Sujet-Verlag, Bremen, 2026.
