Jakov Lind

Peripatetic writer who escaped Austria as a child, hid in Holland in the war and described his experiences in a series of books.

Born February 10, 1927 in Vienna, died February 16, 2007 in London. Jakov Lind was an Austrian writer. As an eleven-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Vienna after the Anschluss, found temporary refuge in Holland, and succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity. After a literary apprenticeship in Israel, he moved to London, where he wrote, in German, the short stories and novels on which his stature as a major European writer are based: “Soul of Wood”, “Landscape in Concrete”, and “Ergo”.

After many years in England Lind began writing in English and the stories in “The Stove” were the first written in his new language. Through his girlfriend Annie Truxell the painter, he found Deia in 1967, rented and renovated the Tower (Jakov’s Tower) above the Cala and lived there, in London and in the Chelsea Hotel, N.Y. for the next 40 years until his death in 2007.

Links about Jakov

New York Review of Books collection

Guardian Obituary

University of Rochester article

Jakov Lind website

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