Alene i Danmark
Tanker on hus og hjem
How to Be Alone in Denmark (Alene I Danmark) is about the search for a home. And about modern man's rootlessness and his ability to transplant himself. About looking for security in the big world and in one's family history in New York and Belarus. About loneliness. And about finding what one is looking for in a rose garden and a little peasant's cottage in the Danish countryside.
​
Click here to read an excerpt from How to Be Alone in Denmark (Alene I Danmark), entitled "Ghosts on the Landing," published in the Tiferet Journal, Spring/Summer 2020.
That the cottage [that Blecher writes about in the book] has its own actual life doesn't seem impossible. Blecher writes with great feeling for the place. People who live in old houses will recognize these feelings. The house creaks and squeaks and testifies to a kind of haunting that no rational person believes in but may therefore be true. Dependence on a place--which stretches far beyond one's physical existence--is quite obvious to those who are dependent; the place is the repository of dreams and daydreams, nurtured by representations of the past... The elegaic tone of the book, which is the book's deepest theme, is so well-crafted by the author that this excellent essay on matters of the heart does not for a moment ring sentimental or false.
​
--Georg Metz, Information (Copenhagen)
​
​
With a mixture of monologue and essay that approaches the linguistic level of a novel, George Blecher writes about a home that began with a summer house in Denmark... but connects to different "homes" around the world that are part of his effort to create an "inner" home removed from the world's stress and impermanence... a very charming depiction of Blecher's attempt to build such a home... a fine interplay between family history, memoir, and a psychological study of rootlessness and yearning for home.
​
--Peter Holm Rasmussen, netpunkt.dk