A refugee rides the wave of history

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently raised transatlantic hackles when he accused the United States of being too isolated and insular in its literary output and tastes. Forgetting the more extreme balderdash of Engdahl's incendiary remarks, it might be conceded that we Americans read very few contemporary translations from abroad and, as a result, miss out on a host of world - class writing. Case in point: Christoph Hein, widely considered to be the most important German writer after G