Aunt Rachel's Fur: A Novel Improvised in Sad Laughter

After ten years of bleak and unsuccessful exile in the Land of the Free following the end of World War II, the writer Rémond Namredef has decided to return to his homeland of France to find a publishing house for his first novel. Aunt Rachel's Fur is narrated, or rather spoken by Namredef across a table in a café in Paris to a "professional listener of stories" named Féderman (the implicit reader and critic in the text). The writer's return to France results in a reckoning with his family, or at least with those who remained after the "Unforgivable Enormity", but it is also a settling of accounts with the collaborating and hypocritical France of the years 1940 to 1945 and beyond. ...the public doesn't give a shit about my little story of survival, what the public wants is ass stories, and that's why I'd better get back to Aunt Rachel's story... - Rémond Namredef RAYMOND FEDERMAN (1928-2009) were many persons: Holocaust survivor and WWII orphan, farm worker, paratrooper in the US Army, Korean War veteran, interpreter in Tokyo, sporting ace (swimming, tennis, golf), jazz musician, black marketeer, gambler, bon vivant, inventor of surfiction, bilingual author, translator, teacher, renowned Samuel Beckett scholar, Distinguished Professor, and father. Federman was born in Paris, France, in 1928. When he was fourteen years old, his parents and two sisters were arrested during the 1942 roundup by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp for extermination. The boy survived because his mother had pushed him into a closet for hiding. In different versions, and both in English and in French, Federman again and again told various parts of the life story of a man called "Federman," trying to decipher the gesture of his mother that saved his life. He received the American Book Award, and his books have been translated into 14 languages. Invisible Starfall Books' RAYMOND FEDERMAN EDITION is a series of republications of the author's books in their definitive version, spiced up with first editions of unpublished and uncollected texts. Carefully proofread and with a new design, each book was produced in close cooperation with Simone Federman, the daughter and literary executor of Raymond Federman.