Dutch Novelist and Essayist Was a High School Dropout
Page 36 T cjnews.com T HE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS November 27, 2008 And now for something completely different: Dutch novelist and essayist was a high school dropout By SHELDON KIRSHNER table Dutch movies. But soon enough, Staff Reporter he learned that he had no future as an actor. “It would not bring me any- For a guy who dropped out of high school at the thing,” he said. age of 17, Arnon Grunberg has fared remarkably He next worked as a clerk for a well. Twenty years on, Grunberg, Hol land’s literary telephone-book publishing company. wunderkind, is a successful author, with 20 books, The boss, a kind man who took a including 10 novels, to his credit. liking to him, fi red Grunberg, telling Nonetheless, Grunberg, 37, is not exactly a him that he was destined for great er household name outside Hol land, even though fi ve things. In 1990, when he was all but of his novels have been translated into English and 19, he founded a publishing com pany. published in the United States, where he has lived “Work ing with books came naturally to for the past 13 years. me,” he said. His latest work in English, The Jew ish Messiah Grunberg published five books, (Penguin Press), is vintage Grunberg. A biting Ger man works in Dutch, but no one satire with a grim twist about a quirky Swiss teen- bought them, and he went bankrupt. “I ager whose grandfather was a Nazi storm trooper guess I wasn’t a good businessman,” and who converts to Judaism and settles in Israel, he said.
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