Rachel Seiffert’s A Boy in Winter (2017) and the Literary Construction of Ukraine

This article analyses the literary representation of Nazi-occupied Ukraine in Rachel Seiffert’s 2017 novel A Boy in Winter. It does so by exploring the novel’s documentary and fictional influences, from which its concern with the genocide of the Jews and the German colonization of the East is crafted. The alterations and omissions from the historical accounts and the novel’s use of modernist literary techniques combine in a way that resembles the methods of other examples of Holocaust fiction, but in this case to create a distinctive allegorical mode. The article concludes by arguing that ultimately the most significant influence on A Boy in Winter is a novel from almost a century earlier, Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932).