Peter Stephan Jungk Die Reise über den Hudson A Drive Across the Hudson Verlag Klett-Cotta, J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, August 2005, 226 pp. ISBN 3-608-93469-3 Gustav Rubin, a fur merchant based in Vienna, arrives at New York’s JFK airport on a delayed flight from London and is met by his mother Rosa. They rent a car to drive to Gustav’s home, but he loses his way and they find themselves on the wrong side of the river. As they try to drive back they are caught up in a gigantic traffic jam, and for the rest of this short but deeply-pondered novel are gridlocked high above the waters of the Hudson river, on the blocked Tappan Zee bridge. Boiling in the heat of the midday sun, both Gustav and his mother believe they can see the gigantic corpse of Gustav’s recently deceased father, Ludwig David Rubin, a famous émigré scientist, floating in the waters below. This is a mystical happening, and a mystically-minded girl called Erin, with whom they get into conversation (she was the pilot of Gustav’s plane incidentally), expounds the magical qualities of their surroundings. With dusk approaching and the traffic jam clearing Erin drives Rosa home. Gustav parks his car on the hard shoulder, mounts the scaffolding, and climbs down the bridge to touch his dead father in the water. It is through the animated dialogue between Gustav and his mother, and the childhood memories they evoke, that Jungk broadens out his material into a novel about a family and its past. The real relationship between Rosa and her husband, a compulsive skirt-chaser, is dragged into the light, while it also becomes clear that the presence of this intellectual heavyweight of a father continues to constrain the personal freedom of his son. Kafka’s short story, Das Urteil, comes to mind in this context, for in both tales the father comes close to resembling that most haunting of monsters in Jewish mythology, the Golem. But Jungk’s story, unlike Kafka’s, has an entirely topical slant: its exposition of the difference between the generation of European intellectual émigrés who arrived in America during the Second World War and that which followed them. This book, however, with its uncanny and unsettling resonances, is not aimed at a particular readership. Its appeal is to all, and it is handled by a true original.