Berlin Jewish Museum Presents "Matters Of Honor"

At Harvard, it's often the small things that make it whether you belong or not: a luggage label, a tweed jacket, an invitation to the "right" student party. And even if Henry White wins all these insignia during the course of his studies at Harvard, he will never really belong to the elite core. He is Jewish, above all in the eyes of others.

In his new novel "Matters of Honor," Begley interweaves his own experiences with a fascinating portrait of the elite American Harvard University in the early 1950s.

He will read from "Matters of Honor" at the Jewish Museum Berlin on Thursday 22 March, 8 pm. Following the reading, Louis Begley will talk to Federal Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück about the significance of his life story for the novel and other topics. Thomas Sparr (Suhrkamp Publishers) will read the German novel text.

Like the author himself, the protagonist Henry White is also a Jewish immigrant from Poland. He is worlds apart from his roommates Sam and Archie, whose parents belong to the American upper-middle class. Henry survived the Holocaust as a teenager in Krakow. Being Jewish is both a stigma and a challenge for him. "Judism" is what he calls this flawed feeling his environment imposes upon him, even though he himself feels no more Jewish "than a smoked ham." Between seminars and elitist dinner parties, Henry, Sam, and Archie try to snatch their slice of the American dream. With "Matters of Honor," Louis Begley has created a sophisticated Bildungsroman and a story about the Holocaust and the sentiments of Americans just after the war.

Louis Begley was born as Ludwik Begleiter in Poland in 1933. He survived the Holocaust in hiding with his mother in Lemberg, Warsaw, and in a remote farming village in Masovia - experiences which he wrote about in his début novel published in 1991 entitled "Wartime Lies." After the war, he and his family emigrated to the USA where he studied at Harvard and became a highly successful corporate lawyer. "Matters of Honor" is his eighth novel. His book "About Schmidt" was filmed starring Jack Nicholson as the leading actor. He worked for a major international law firm in New York until 2004, and has since concentrated exclusively on his writing. In November 2006, Louis Begley became the author in residence at Heidelberg University. -- www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de