Showing Benjamin's Crossing by Jay Parini

The reader discovers at the very beginning of Jay Parini's Benjamin's Crossing that Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish critic and protagonist of the story, is dead. He was swallowed up by the Holocaust in a small town on the border between Spain and France in 1940. With him went 1,000 pages of a precious manuscript that he'd carried with him the length of France while attempting to escape the Nazis. The matter of Benjamin's death disposed of, Parini turns to his life, embarking on an arresting account of Germany and its Jewish intellectual life between the world wars. Benjamin's youth and university days are woven into the greater story of escape and pursuit, along with details of his love affair with the Marxist Asja Lacis and his close friendship with Gershom Scholem, an occasional narrator of Benjamin's story and an eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism.

Benjamin's Crossing begins with Gershom Scholem at Walter Benjamin's Spanish gravesite 10 years after his disappearance. It then moves quickly to Paris 1940, where the critic is preparing to flee from the occupying Nazis after having spent a decade working on his masterpiece. From this point on, Parini alternates between third- person accounts of Benjamin's perilous escape across France and various first-person recollections from the people who knew him. By the end of the novel, not only has one man's life been carefully reconstructed, but also the ethos of a time that passed with him.