A fast-paced, gonzo style novel offering a new kind of no-holds barred contemporary love story about wild bohemian lives in Europe and America.
Alan Kaufman’s latest novel, The Berlin Woman is a haunting love story about two Second Generation Holocaust writers who meet at a literary conference in the Swiss Alps and fall into a mad kind of addictive love affair. Overshadowing their love is a fast-changing, ruthless world in which Anti-Semitism is burgeoning, The Holocaust is denied or forgotten and a new kind of totalitarianism – spearheaded by a new breed of strongmen - threatens to sweep all of humanity, to the very brink of annihilation again. A Ukrainian now living in Berlin, Lena is a married, chronically unfaithful, and devoted only to gratifying her ambitions and hard-driving libido. Nathan is a footloose womanizing American author, unable to produce the big novel for which he’s been contracted. They chase each other selfishly, sexually and even digitally across Europe and America, turning their affair into a high-stakes reckless game of jealousy, rivalling ambitions, gender conflict, political combat and artistic outrage.
Alan Kaufman, poet, editor, writer, and painter, born and raised in the Bronx, graduated City College of New York and in 1977 moved to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces. Kaufman has been a central figure in the Jewish countercultural movement, co-editing It’s the Jews! A Celebration of New Jewish Visions (1995, with Danny Shot) and editing the magazine Davka: Jewish Cultural Revolution. He is the author of the novel Matches (2005), the memoir, Jew Boy (2000, 2017) and the memoir, Drunken Angel (2007). He is also the editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999, co-edited with S.A. Griffin) and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (2004, co-edited with Barney Rosset and Neil Ortenberg). His reviews appear widely in journals such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the Partisan Review.
