Übung in Gehorsam

Übung in Gehorsam is a multidimensional study of the relationship between power and powerlessness. Sarah Bernstein brilliantly sketches the everyday observations of a young woman who follows her brother to a nameless place from which her ancestors were once expelled. Bernstein’s dense, rhythmic prose follows the narrator as she becomes increasingly lost in a hostile foreign environment, circling around a sibling relationship that oscillates between self-sacrifice and repression. She concentrically moves around individual and collective experiences of oppression. Homelessness and rootlessness are explored from the perspective of the Jewish protagonist, and the internal and external constraints to which she is subjected become legible in many ways. Bernstein describes the claustrophobic confines of village life with ease and traces a violent history that reaches far back into the past and ultimately manifests itself in the reversal of family power relations. Beatrice Faßbender’s elegant translation immerses the reader directly in this extraordinary examination of guilt, shame and trauma.
—Elisabeth Wellershaus

Sarah Bernstein comes from Montreal and lives with her family in Scotland, where she teaches literature and creative writing. In addition to several poetry publications, she has published two novels. In 2023, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Übung in Gehorsam was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Canadian Giller Prize.

Beatrice Faßbender has translated poetry and prose by Jeffrey Yang, Eliot Weinberger, Kathy Page, Priya Basil, and others. In 2014, she edited the anthology New York. Eine literarische Einladung [New York: A literary Invitation] for Wagenbach. She has received grants from the German Translators’ Fund, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (Canada) and Ledig House, New York.