Arnost Lustig's fiction has always been too close to the facts for comfort. In The House of Returned Echoes, he pays tribute to the life of his father, who died in Auschwitz in 1944. In Prague in the difficult time between the wars, a man fights to keep his family and his business alive despite anti-Semitism and economic hardship. Emil Ludvig has always relied on the simple rules of his family and the basic laws of civilization to counteract his misfortunes, and, being a decent man himself, he refuses to believe that the Nazi threats will be carried out. Yet, he also becomes a victim of the camps, and his story resonates with both Lustig's personal experiences and the shared memories of the Holocaust.

ARNOST LUSTIG (1926-2011) was born in Czechoslovakia in 1926. After internment in Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, he escaped from a train of prisoners bound for Dachau. He returned to Prague to fight in the Czech resistance in 1945 and went into exile following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lustig now lives in the United States, where he teaches writing, literature, and the history of film at the American University.