Lind, Jakov 1927-2007 (Heinz Landwirth)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born February 10, 1927, in Vienna, Austria; died February 16 (one source says February 17), 2007, in London, England. Artist and author. Lind was well known for his autobiographies about how he successfully pretended not to be Jewish to survive the Holocaust. When the Germans invaded Austria in 1938, Lind's parents fled to Palestine but left their eleven-year-old son at home. He managed to get to Amsterdam, but when the Netherlands fell to the Nazis, instead of hiding he changed his name from Heinz Landwirth to Jan Overbeek. He moved to Germany and worked under the Nazi's noses as a ship's mate on the Rhine River. By the end of the war, he was even more daringly working for the Luftwaffe. With the war over, he assumed the name Jakov Chaklan and then Jakov Lind. He moved to Palestine to join his parents, living there for five years before returning to Vienna. He studied acting under Max Reinhardt, but had a distaste for what he considered the bourgeois Austrian culture. He therefore moved to London in 1954, working a variety of jobs while writing, too. His fiction often dealt with the horrors of war, as in his short-story collection Eine Seele aus Holz (1963; translated as Soul of Wood and Other Stories, 1964). Under the name Lind, he published short stories, plays, novels, and autobiographies. Among his plays are Anna Laub (1965) and Ergo (1968), which was an adaptation of his novel Eine bessere Welt: In fünfzehn Kapiteln (1966). His other novels include Landschaft in Beton (1962; translated as Landscape in Concrete, 1966) and Travels to the Enu (1982). In England and the United States, Lind was most recognized for his autobiography Counting My Steps (1969); he later wrote more about his life in Numbers: A Further Autobiography (1972). Buying a second home in the United States, Lind was a writer in residence at the Long Island University Brooklyn Center in the mid-1960s. His literary success allowed him to buy yet another home in Majorca, and it was here he concentrated on his second profession: watercolor painting. Lind was recognized for his writings in his home of Vienna when he received the city's major literary prize in 1983 and, in 1997, won Vienna's Gold Medal of Honor. In 2007 he was given the Theodor Kramer Prize from Germany posthumously.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), March 28, 2007, p. 73.