<DIV>?<I>Aaron’s Leap</I> takes you on an epic journey, which is also a very intimate and personal story?entertaining, touching and brutally honest. Her characters are full of compassion and tenderness, but are never sentimental. It’s a great book.” ?<B>AGNIESZKA HOLLAND</B>, Academy Award-nominated writer and director of <I>Europa Europa</I> and HBO guest director of <I>Treme</I> and </I>The Wire</I><BR><BR>?This young author’s book immediately caught my interest for its narrative mastery and remarkably skillful identification with the complex atmosphere of the Interbellum era . . . [A] brilliant novel.” ?<B>IVAN KLÍMA</B>, Franz Kafka Prize-winning author of <I>Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light</I> and <I>My Crazy Century</I><BR><BR>Based on the real-life story of Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, <I>Aaron’s Leap</I> is framed by the lens of a twenty first-century Israeli film crew delving into the extraordinary life of a woman who taught art to children in the Nazi transport camp of Terezín and died in Auschwitz. Aided by the granddaughter of one of the artist’s pupils, the filmmakers begin to uncover buried secrets from a time when personal and artistic decisions became matters of life-and-death. Spanning a century of Central European history, the novel evokes the founding impulses, theories, and personalities of the European Modernist movement (with characters modeled after Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel) and shows what it takes to grapple with a troubled history, ?leap” into the unknown, and dare to be oneself.<BR><BR><B>Magdaléna Platzová</B> was raised in Prague and has lived in Washington, DC and New York City, where she taught literature at NYU, and now lives in Lyon, France. She is the author of a children’s book, two collections of short stories, and three novels, including <I>Aaron’s Leap,</I> a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, hailed by the <I>Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung</I> as a novel that ?must be counted among the best written by contemporary Czech writers.” It is her first book to be published in English.<BR></DIV>