David Joseph – författare

When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, he was given a rapturous reception. Millions lined the streets and filled the squares of Vienna. Tobias Portschy, a self-appointed regional Nazi chief, considered what to give the Fuhrer for his birthday, and devised a particular gift from the Austrian people: the elimination of Jewish life in the Burgenland, picturesque farming country about 70 km south-east of Vienna. Eichmann took note of the brutal methodology. The Holocaust had begun.Burgenland is an astonishing survey of Jewish history in Central Europe, an account of the opening salvo of what turned into the systematic industrial-scale genocide of European Jewry, a stern examination of British policy and the world’s wholly inadequate response. It is also a deeply personal memoir and family history. Impeccably researched and hugely ambitious in scope, it narrates the full arc of the Jewish experience in Central Europe over 300 years, following the lives of one family who played a significant part in events described, from the struggle for civil liberties to the resistance to fascism and the rise of Zionism.David Joseph has dissected an uncomfortable history, and the results demand a substantial reassessment of the orthodox narrative around the Holocaust both in Britain and in Austria.

In David Joseph's fourth collection of fiction, I Wanted To Be A Bluesman, he explores human relationships through the Delta-dipped lens of the blues.Each of the twelve stories in this collection are carefully intertwined with the blues from Mississippi to Chicago and places in between. Along the way, the bricklayer, priest, car thief, cook, and others are connected through the common thread of the blues. Whether traveling by car towards Clarksdale in searing summer heat or on a train bound for the north, the blues cross borders and play on.And yet, these aren t so much stories about the blues as they are stories about regular people who are connected to the music through the manner in which the blues have spoken to them and shaped their lives. The music provides the backdrop for their dreams, desires, memories, decisions, uncertainty, secrets, and, in some cases, their chance at redemption.