"Alfred Doblin, author of the classic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, has been hailed by Kafka and Gunter Grass as one of the greatest German writers of this century. In this stunning autobiography, Doblin recounts his nightmarish flight from the Nazis." "As Jewish refugees living in Paris, Doblin and his family were forced to flee Hitler's armies in 1940. This story of his tortured journey through France, Spain, Portugal, and finally to America reads like an adventure novel. Here is Doblin carrying heavy luggage and a manuscript along the dusty roads of France, traveling in a cattle car, stuck in one obscure provincial town after another, in and out of refugee camps, constantly out of money. He had left Paris after his family, and only after desperately searching for them are they reunited. Fortunately, when it comes to their final escape from Europe through Marseille and Lisbon, their passports are prolonged, exit visas granted, and an unknown French civil servant provides them with money for their tickets to America. The last part of the book chronicles Doblin's stay in Hollywood and gives a devastating portrait of Alexanderplatz upon his return to Germany." "What makes Destiny's Journey so wonderfully rich is that we witness not only the flight of a refugee, but also a significant stage in the author's intellectual journey - Doblin's personal transformation from a Jewish radical socialist to a Catholic. How astonishing that the author of Journey to Poland, who had written so movingly of the spirituality of the Jewish people, here experiences a conversion to Christianity in a refugee camp in southern France." "Destiny's Journey is a moving chronicle of two journeys - one of the refugee and the other of the spirit - and makes us understand Doblin's lifelong, stubborn, and contradictory thirst for a metaphysical view of the world and himself."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved