Deborah Feldman

Indeed, books and literature played an existential role in Ms. Feldman’s life from early on. As a girl, she was forbidden to read books, but did so anyway, risking punishment to sneak into public libraries. Young adult novels like “Anne of Green Gables” and “Little Women” inspired her. In the main characters, she saw the possibility for self-determination. She taught herself English with the help of homemade vocabulary lists: peccary, pecuniary, perspicacious. “I really liked words,” she said. “For me, the biggest problem was that I had never heard the words spoken out loud.”

She is reveling in this new voice that writing in German, rather than English, has opened up for her. In rededicating herself to writing, she says she credits the literature that gave her hope in her darkest hours. “When everything in your life is bleak, and you see someone writing lovingly about this bleakness,” she added, “it’s so legitimizing.”

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