André Kaminski was born in Geneva in 1923 after his Jewish family moved there from Poland. He earned a Ph.D. in history and taught at the University of Geneva for several years before going to Poland for ideological reasons in 1950. There he became a TV writer and producer, with a few stints as a journalist posted to Morocco and Algeria. Finally disenchanted with Communism, he moved back to Switzerland in 1969, continued to work in television, and published twelve books before his death in Zurich in 1991. Only one of these books, the prize-winning novel Nächstes Jahr in Jerusalem (Kith and Kin, Fromm 1988) is available in English.