Feinberg, Anat. Embodied Memory: The Theatre of George Tabori. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000. 346pp. $39.95 hardcover. The Hungarian-Jewish playwright George Tabori, who in the last decade has become somewhat of a cultural icon in Germany, is still largely unknown in the United States. This is in part due to the linguistic and physical transgression of borders that defines the author and his work. In the course of his itinerant life Tabori has lived and worked in Hungary, the Middle East, England, the United States, Germany, and Austria He writes in English, yet, since the early 1970's, primarily for a German-speaking audience (his texts are translated for publication). He has also been an influential director, notorious for his unauthoritarian methods and provocative productions. George Tabori's multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-linguistic background and his work in the different genres of literature, theater, and film flusters not only librarians but has also posed a barrier to literary scholarship on his work, for which clear categorization is still critical. To qualify Tabori as a German author, for example, is problematic, for even though he has been awarded Germany's most prestigious literary prize, the Bachner-Preis (1992), his own persona calls into question the very notion of national authorship. Tabori's career in Germany began in 1969 at the age of 55 when most people contemplate retirement. Until then the author had made his name in the United States as a novelist, a writer of screenplays for movies such as Hitchcock's I Confess, and a Broadway director who reintroduced Bertolt Brecht to an American audience. There were several reasons why Tabori decided to remain in Germany after the successful Berlin production of Die Kannibalen, a play with a decidedly grotesque edge, the main one being that he wanted to seize the opportunity to pursue his dramatic ambitions in a subsidized theater culture offering excellent working conditions and a responsive audience. In Embodied Memory Anat Feinberg, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish literature at the University for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg, traces Tabori's theater work as playwright and director since the late 1960s, foregrounding his singular contribution to contemporary theatre and to the so-called Theatre of the Holocaust (ix). After three essay collections on Tabori that appeared in short succession in the late 1990s as well as some earlier, but more general monographs, Feinberg's book is the first study of Tabori's theater work that is both comprehensive and systematic, and certainly the first study of its scope in English. Her book starts out with an excellent biographical introduction, which is followed by three main sections of four or five chapters each. These focus on Tabori's early experimental work in Germany, involving texts by Kafka and Beckett, his Shakespeare adaptions, both productive and idiosyncratic readings of plays such as Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet, and finally his plays The Cannibals, My Mother's Courage, Jubilee, and most notably Mein Kampf The monograph also includes a middle section with photographs, which provide glimpses of selected productions. …