Address Unknown Read online

  En route to Italy in 1966 on the Italian Line’s Michelangelo, Kathrine met the American sculptor John Rood. The two felt an immediate attraction, had a shipboard romance, and were married the following year in Minneapolis, where he made his home. Thereafter, they lived part of each year in Minneapolis, part in the Val di Pesa, outside Florence. Even after Rood’s death in 1974, Kathrine kept both homes for nearly twenty years, living quietly in each six months a year, simply as Mrs John Rood.

  Then, in 1995, when she was ninety-one years old, Story Press reissued Address Unknown, ‘to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps,’ and because, as Story editor Lois Rosenthal wrote, its ‘significant and timeless message’ had earned it ‘a permanent place on the bookshelves’ of America. The book was well-received, and Kathrine, happily signing copies and granting television and press interviews, was gratified at its re-emergence, this time with the stature of a classic of American literature.

  Kathrine Kressmann Taylor Rood died the following year, in July 1996, late in her ninety-third year, sharp-witted, perceptive, and enthusiastic, even about the end of life. ‘Dying,’ she said in her last week, ‘is normal. It’s as normal as being born.’ And she was ready. She had lived several successful lives: as a wife and mother, as a popular professor, and as the author of four books and a dozen short stories, one of which, Address Unknown, had been recognized as a classic while she lived.

  Shortly after her death, a copy of the 1995 reissue came into the hands of French publisher Henry Dougier, of Éditions Autrement, Paris. He saw at once its relevance to the entire European community, both those who had lived under the Nazi domination and those who needed to know what it had been like. He determined that a French translation must be undertaken, and that translation, by Michèle Lévy-Bram, hit the French bestseller list in late 1999. Inconnu à cette adresse sold 50,000 copies that first year; 100,000 the next, and another 250,000 since, selling far more than it ever had in the United States. Soon other Europeans were reading it, calling for its translation and publication in their own languages: Spanish, Catalan, Gallego, Basque, Italian, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, and now from the rest of the world as well – Greek, Turkish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and others (twenty-three languages by 2010).

  The great success of Address Unknown in book form has led to other successes: audio books in German, Italian and French; radio productions in England, France, Israel and Croatia; live theater productions in France, Israel, Turkey, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Argentina, the US, including off-Broadway in 2004, and in both French and English at the Soho Theatre in London in 2013.

  It is exciting to see this little book recognized as a classic, and it is gratifying that my mother lived to see its recognition as such with the 1995 Story Press edition, and to authorize in her last year the first of many translations – into Hebrew, by the noted scholar/translator Asher Tarmon of Israel.

  What the world will know of this story in future generations is hard to imagine, but it now seems that it will survive and will be included in the significant literature of the twentieth century.

  Charles Douglas Taylor,

  son of Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

  About the Author

  KATHRINE KRESSMANN TAYLOR was an American author best remembered for Address Unknown, originally published in Story magazine in 1938. She was also the author of Day of No Return, and a professor of creative writing and journalism at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania for nineteen years. Kressmann Taylor died in Minnesota in 1996.

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  Also by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

  Day of No Return (Until That Day)

  Diary of Florence in Flood (Ordeal by Water)

  Jours d’orage (Storm on the Rock)

  Ainsi rêvent les femmes

  Ainsi mentent les hommes

  Monsieur Pan

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ADDRESS UNKNOWN. Copyright © 1938 by Kressmann Taylor. Copyright renewed © 1966, 2015 by C. Douglas Taylor. Afterword copyright © 2015 by C. Douglas Taylor. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Margot Livesey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Elizabeth Yaffe

  Cover artwork by Felix Nussbaum (1904 [Osnabrück]–1944 [Auschwitz-Birkenau]), Am Sandpfad in Emden, 1926, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Foundation Gerhard ten Doornkaat Koolman and Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum Emden, photographed by Martinus Ekkenga.

  Originally published in the United States in 1938 by Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Ecco® and HarperCollins® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd.

  Digital Edition JUNE 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-306850-6

  Version 05192021

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-306849-0

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