Hans-Joachim Schädlich

Fyodor Kokoshkin has great dignity. This is evident in quite ordinary things. The 95-year-old retired professor of biology from Boston, a declared specialist in grass, would never go to a restaurant without wearing a jacket. On the Queen Mary II, he displays the appropriate combination of friendliness and distance towards his table companions and, on the crossing from Southampton to New York he courts Olga Noborra, who is in her mid-forties, with perfect elegance. (…) On just 190 pages, Schädlich designs a troubling story of expulsion, flight and exile. He spans a precise frame and has his hero begin his return home to the USA on 8 September 2005, where at dawn six days later he passes by the Statue of Liberty and sees the silhouette of New York. The ship’s passengers with their fixed rituals and the pleasant ocean crossing enable Kokoshkin to take a retrospective look, not only at the trip he has just taken to Prague, Petersburg and Berlin with a Czech friend called Hlavácek, but at his whole childhood and youth. Most of this he conjures up in dialogue with Hlavácek.

Maike Albath: „Ein Leben im 20. Jahrhundert“
© Frankfurter Rundschau, 12 March 2010