Stefan Chwin (b. 1949), a novelist and essayist. Chwin also writes adventure-fantasy tales for younger readers and illustrates them himself. He has also written critical and historical studies of literature. He lives in Gdansk and works at the university there. His most recent book is Esther. Hanemann is currently being made into a film by Agnieszka Holland.

Chwin almost literally tells his story "in coffee spoons", from the touching moment when the narrator's parents wipe their shoes before first setting foot in their "post-German" flat, till the time a few pages from the end, when the process we have come to know as "ethnic cleansing" turns its attention to the dead, and the German cemetery is dug up. "The cemetery," Chwin's narrator notes, "was dying."

I know as a translator that one waits, often for many years, for a writer to come along who writes as beautifully as one longs to write oneself. Death in Danzig is a beautiful book, and nothing about it is more sumptuously and expressively beautiful than Philip Boehm's translation.

San Francisco Chronicle:

In a novel permeated with loss and death, Stefan Chwin writes, "Maybe one of the wisest things you can know is exactly when to die." If the real trick is knowing "when," as Chwin suggests, then one wonders if his characters miss their opportunity to seize the moment, or do they realize it has not yet arrived?

Published in Europe under the title "Hanemann," the novel unfolds in Gdansk, Poland, during a chaotic transition period of the 1940s. The city experiences a major upheaval as the German population flees during the closing days of World War II and is replaced by incoming Polish refugees. Hanemann, a German professor of anatomy, elects to stay behind and share a house with the Polish narrator and his family. Eventually Hanka, a young Ukrainian woman, and a homeless, speechless child become part of the household.

These three individuals, all scarred by personal traumas, live on the fringe of life in a changing social climate. The death and rebirth of the city plays out against the melancholy indifference of Hanemann, who just quietly exists in an emotionless void. Ruminating over famous historical suicides, he appears to be unable to decide if the "time" is right for taking some kind of final action. Hanka's unsuccessful attempt to kill herself snaps the professor out of his brooding and pushes him back into life.

In an atmosphere of upheaval, death and renewal, Chwin seems to be suggesting that because there's no going back, you might as well get on with it. A haunting story, "Death in Danzig" poses some provocative questions about loss, change and mortality.