Visas for America. A Story of an Escape.

Sydney, Villon Press, [1952]. 8vo. Original cloth with illustrated dust-wrappers; pp. [vi], 267, [3 publisher's advertisement for another work by the author]; near fine. Incredibly rare first edition in English, number 23 of 'fifty special copies … numbered and signed by the Author' (however, this not signed). Translated by E. Baker, revised by E. Bell-Smith and with a foreword by Herbert V. Evatt, this is a novel about a Jewish refugee couple escaping last-minute from Nazi-occupied Germany, informed by so many similar real cases in the 1940s. 'Because human dignity suffered such damage, one must be eternally vigilant lest mankind is ever again enforced to endure such ultimate misery' (foreword). 'The author and poet Salamon Dembitzer was born in Cracow (Kraków, Poland) in 1888. As a teenager he moved to Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Kassel, where he worked as an editor for the Kasseler Volksblatt. At age 16, some of his poetry was already published. Until the 1930s, Dembitzer worked for several newspapers in Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna, and continued publishing his poems and - starting in 1930 - his novels and dramas. In 1941, he moved to New York and later to Sydney, Australia. In 1958, Salamon Dembitzer moved to Lugano, Switzerland, where he died in 1964' (Leo Beack Institute, online, they are holding a second edition only). COPAC locates two copies, which might be the 2nd, trade edition, at Senate House and in the British Library. - We can not trace any other copy of this title on the market, past and present.