Reviewed: ‘Twelve Post-War Tales’ by Graham Swift

One day in 1959, Pvt. Joseph Caan, a 19-year-old soldier in the British army, visits a German town hall on a fact-finding mission. The official who receives him, Hans Büchner, notes the young man’s nerves and tries to put him at ease with his near-flawless command of English. Pvt. Caan would like to know what happened to his Jewish relatives in Hanover during the war. Büchner informs him that he has come to the wrong department but still offers to help. It prompts him to muse on what kind of closure such people want and expect. What, he asks himself, do “these needy and haunted ones” who keep coming forward really hope for? “To be given back the actual ashes, the actual dust, the actual

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