" Berlin Atomized is the world bridged coupled and made fast — by the latest lost generation
and by Julia Kornberg's border-and-genre-crossing talent as restless as a flame." —Joshua
Cohen author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Jewish Book Award winning The Netanyahus A
kinetic globetrotting novel following three siblings—Jewish and downwardly mobile—from 2001 to
2034 as they come of age against the major crises of the 21st century. Berlin Atomized
begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes
too frequently washing with fervor and repeating: “I am not asleep.” She grows up partying and
taking undeserved siestas while her eldest brother Jeremías is drawn into the city’s powder
keg music scene and the middle sibling Mateo learns of his terminal illness and prepares to
join the IDF. Though Argentina faces the worst economic crisis in its history the Goldsteins
are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working class families.
Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth unaware that the
gated community will soon be underwater and their family scattered all over the earth. The
second half of the novel takes place between 2018 and 2035 invoking and imagining possible
futures for this existence in migration. Jeremías lives in Paris until an undeclared war
destroys the city and Nina after tracing Mateo’s last steps to his death in Tel Aviv ends up
in Berlin where the European Union is found in the shambles of its own history. From Punta del
Este to Paris Berlin to Jerusalem Brussels to Tokyo the novel progresses into a dire near
future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another. Defiant and
dexterous percussive and percolating with violent light Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg’s
napalm-ic debut—a tale about the end of the world as told by the clear-eyed youth to which
that world had been promised.
