Jakov Lind

Who was Jakov Lind?

Jakov Lind was an Austrian-British writer. As an 11-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss, found temporary refuge in the Netherlands, and succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity: that of Jan Gerrit Overbeek. During this time, he worked on a barge in the Rhine, transporting goods between the Netherlands and Germany. Of this period, Lind later wrote, "As Jan Gerrit Overbeek, I felt safe for the first time. It is crazy, walking around freely when one really should be sitting in a concentration camp. Crazy, perhaps, but a craziness that made me content, and happy."

In 1945, Jan Gerrit Overbeek became Jakov Chaklan, and he made his way to Haifa. After a literary apprenticeship, a marriage, and the birth of a son, he moved to Vienna for three years. Finally, in 1954, he settled in London, where he wrote, in German, the short stories and novels on which his stature as a major European writer is based: Soul of Wood, Landscape in Concrete, and Ergo. Lind began writing in English and the autobiography Counting My Steps was the first book written in his new language.