Reunion (American edition)

A powerfully poignant read!

This novella, Fred Uhlman's entry into the world of fiction, was first published in 1970 when it went largely unnoticed. It was published again in 1977 and this time it captured the hearts of millions.

This is powerful stuff about what friendship is about: the story of two boys attending the same school, one comes from an aristocratic family, the other one is Jewish and from a middle-class family. Yet their friendship is over within a couple of years. This is Germany in the 1930s and this is a poignant story.

In his introduction, Arthur Koestler (1976) says: "When I first read Fred Uhlman's 'Reunion' some years ago, I wrote to the author (whom I only knew by reputation as a painter) that I considered it a minor masterpiece." Coming from Koestler, who wrote another such masterpiece 'Darkness at Noon' this is a compliment of the highest order. Both books are worthy of being read in the same light. Koestler, like a few others, recognized the book's merits when it was first published.

The opening lines of 'Reunion' are telling: "He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, more than nine thousand days, desultory and tedious, hollow with the sense of effort or work without hope - days and years, many of them as dead as dry leaves on a dead tree.
I can remember the day and the hour when I first set my eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair."

This novella is worth reading at least twice to grasp the significance of what Uhlman says in this short masterpiece, something that many writers fail to do in works of fiction three or four times its size. What Uhlman says, in this beautifully written work, affects us all.