EDGAR HILSENRATH'S LITERARY WORK has seldom been discussed in the context of German-language authors from Bukovina, although Hilsenrath has written one of the few literary representations of the forgotten Holocaust that occurred in Transnistria. Hilsenrath was born in 1926 in Leipzig. In 1938, as the Nazi threat became imminent in Germany, his father sent him, his mother, and his younger brother to Romania. The Bukovinian town of Sereth/Siret seemed a safe haven for his family at the time. Three years later, however, they shared the fate of Bukovinian Jews who were deported by Germans and Romanians to the thirteen camps in Transnistria.

Hilsenrath calls Die Abenteuer des Ruben Jablonski (1999) an autobiographical novel, signaling thereby the authenticity of the facts as well as the fictitious aspects of the narrative.