About the Author
Angel Wagenstein was born in the city of Plovdiv in 1922 and spent his early childhood in exile with his family in Paris. Upon his return to Bulgaria as a high school student, he joined an antifascist underground group. For taking part in anti-Nazi sabotage during World War II, he was sent to a labor camp from which he escaped to rejoin the Bulgarian partisans. Arrested, tortured, and condemned to death, he owes his life to the arrival of the Red Army in Bulgaria on September 9, 1944.
After studying filmmaking in Moscow, he went on to become one of the foremost screenwriters in Bulgaria, with more than fifty credits to his name, including the original screenplay for the film Stars, which in 1959 won the Cannes Prix Spécial du Jury, and tells the story of a German soldier’s doomed attempts to rescue a young Greek-Jewish woman and her family, who are all being transported to certain death in the “Eastern Territories” of the Reich.
He has in recent years written three novels on the fate of European Jews in the twentieth century, of which Isaac’s Torah (Petoknizhie Isaakovo), which has already been translated into French and German, is the first. His two other novels have also been translated into French: Far from Toledo (Dalech Ot Toledo), under the title Abraham Le Poivrot (Abraham the Sot), winner of the Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne in 2004; and Farewell, Shanghai (Sbogom, Shanghai), published in English by Handsel Books in 2007. Wagenstein wrote the screenplay for the film After the End of the World (1998) while simultaneously working on the novel Far from Toledo on which it is based—a singular case, it would seem, of an original screenplay’s simultaneously giving birth to its adaptation as a novel and vice versa.
Wagenstein resides in Sofia, where he takes an active part in Bulgarian culture and politics.
Isaac's Torah Page 25