The Invisible Bridge (98 page)

Above all, this book owes its existence to my grandparents Andrew and Irene Tibor, and to my great uncle and aunt Alfred and Susan Tibor. Deepest gratitude for your patience, belief, and generosity. To my uncle Alfred, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions, narrate our family's stories, and read the draft so carefully. To my grandmother, Anyu, most profound thanks: you read and edited with a poet's artistry, a dressmaker's exactitude, and a mother's sensitivity. The insight you provided could have come from nowhere else.

My husband, Ryan Harty, read this novel countless times, and offered his incomparably acute editorial insight, his deep understanding of character, and his flawless ear for language. At every stage he made me feel that finishing the book was possible and necessary. No words of thanks can ever be enough.

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Continuum International Publishing Group: The poem "D'Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige" from
Les Epigrammes
by Clement Marot (London: Athlone Press, 1970).

Reprinted by permission of Continuum International Publishing Group.

New Directions Publishing Corp., Hamish Hamilton, and Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co.: "It is," from
Unrecounted
by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hamburger, copyright (c) 2004 by The Estate of W. G. Sebald. Copyright (c) 2003 by Carl Hanser Verlag Muchen. Translation copyright (c) 2004 by Michael Hamburger.

Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., Hamish Hamilton, and Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Orringer is the author of the award-winning short-story collection
How to
Breathe Underwater
, which was a
New York Times
Notable Book. She is the winner of
The Paris Review's
Discovery Prize and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Ryan Harty.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright (c) 2010 by Julie Orringer

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found at the end of the volume.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Orringer, Julie.

The invisible bridge / Julie Orringer. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-59371-9

1. Architecture students--Fiction. 2. Jews--Hungary--Fiction. 3. Brothers--Fiction.

4. Jews--Persecutions--Fiction. 5. World War, 1939-1945--Europe--Fiction.

6. Budapest (Hungary)--Fiction. 7. Paris (France)--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3615.R59168 2010

813'.6--dc22 2009046498

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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