Logo

14 Facts About Boris Schreiber

1.

Boris Schreiber was born on 28 May 1923 in Berlin, where his parents, Wladimir Schreiber and Eugenie Markowitch, lived as refugees of the Russian Revolution.

2.

Boris Schreiber's father worked for the German-Russian joint stock transport company and later for a German import-export company.

3.

In 1930, they moved to Paris, where Boris Schreiber was sent to several schools, having already been taught French by his aunt in Riga.

4.

Boris Schreiber kept abreast of the literary world and thus discovered the works of other Jewish immigrant writers from the East, in particular those of Irene Nemirovsky and Jean Malaquais.

5.

Boris Schreiber subsequently joined his parents in Paris and met Simone there soon after; they married several years later.

6.

Boris Schreiber's father had set up a successful oil business.

7.

Boris Schreiber was awarded the Prix Combat for La Rencontre des absents.

8.

Boris Schreiber published a dozen novels with several publishers, which received recognition but failed to reach a broad public.

9.

Boris Schreiber travelled abroad and lived in Long Island in the United States for a period of time.

10.

Boris Schreiber began to write a diary at the age of 13 and continued to do so for the rest of his life.

11.

Boris Schreiber lived for writing; he constantly battled with his father, who disapproved of his vocation, and with publishers, whose rejections he found humiliating.

12.

Boris Schreiber was a man who should have been wiped out by history and who had spent a year working for the people who were exterminating his people.

13.

Boris Schreiber's work was therefore the very basis of his own survival but consists of narratives about survival, as demonstrated by the first sentence of his first novel Le Droit d'asile : "The day of my survival was a terrible day".

14.

Boris Schreiber's works are some of the most forceful of those written by people who tried to put the darkest hours of the 20th Century onto paper.