Irena Brežná

Die undankbare Fremde

«We left our land behind in the familiar darkness and came closer to the glow of the new. How much light there is! called Mother, as if that were proof that we were approaching a radiant future.»

Eidgenössische Literaturpreise 2012

The heroine of Irena Brežná's novel 'Die undankbare Fremde' (The Ungrateful Stranger) emigrates from Czechoslovakia to Switzerland in 1968 – as did the author herself – leaving behind oppressive years under a dictatorship. In her new surroundings she encounters new freedoms, prosperity and countless comforts, but also confronts a certain incomprehension and unfamiliar rules and regulations. While the mother delights in everything, the daughter views most things critically. "I felt like an object my mother had placed in a strange house, like an underage bride of a hundred years ago being forced to marry a country as if it were a forbidding old man." Irena Brežná narrates her protagonist's story from two different perspectives and on two interwoven timescales. First we have the newly arrived young woman, confused, often angry. Then we have the trained interpreter, years older and more tolerant, who accompanies asylum seekers to court or hospital. The experiences of these refugees have been far more painful than her own. The Swiss writer Alain Claude Sulzer has called Brežná's novel "a bitter national education, but ending with a reconciliation".
(Martin Zingg/Pro Helvetia)

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: The Ungrateful Stranger

Galiani Verlag, Berlin 2012

ISBN: 978-3-86971-052-5