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Room service

Richard Swartz

1996256 pagesabout 4–6 hours
1996
first published
  • 1996Norstedts · 293 pages · ENGISBN 9789119637727
  • 1998New Press · 256 pages · ENGISBN 9781565844186

Room Service offers detailed images of the people and places of Richard Swartz's adopted slice of Europe, and thoughtful reflection on his status as a privileged outsider. We meet Serbian poets and priests in the service of war, the bewitching wife of a Romanian bigot, a Czech factory manager turned hotel porter in the wake of 1968, Ceaucescu's masseuse, the king of all the gypsies, a cantor who is the last survivor of a Jewish community, and many others - famous, infamous, and anonymous - who take their places in a fascinating, moving, and sometimes cuttingly funny history of a region at the brink of enormous change.

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