The author of my very favorite book has passed away. I was so fervently hoping for something new before he passed, but I’ll be content to re-read his masterpiece “The Dictionary of the Khazars” again and again. And it’s easy to re-read his work, considering how he built his novels:

“An academic whose field, perhaps unsurprisingly, was philosophy, Mr. Pavic taught for many years at the University of Belgrade. Dreamlike, playful and formally unorthodox, his novels were like hardbound hypertext in their insistence on offering readers alternate, nonlinear ways of navigating a story.

Mr. Pavic’s narratives do away with the forced-march, page-after-page strategy to which most readers are accustomed. They are profuse with self-reference, unreliable narration, authorial asides and “Rashomon”-like shifts in point of view. Stories nest within stories like the pieces of a Russian doll.

Mr. Pavic’s next novel, “Landscape Painted With Tea” (Knopf, 1990; translated by Ms. Pribicevic-Zoric), is partly organized as a crossword puzzle, with alternating sections titled “Across” and “Down.” Readers may approach the book chronologically by reading only the “Across” sections, or less chronologically and with more digressions by reading the “Down” sections. Either strategy gradually reveals the story of a soul-searching architect who roams a labyrinth of meditation and memory.”

Yes, books built like lexicons with interlocking entries, books to be “solved” like crossword puzzles, even books based on tarot cards to be interpreted in different patterns. Even though he has passed on, he has left a mysterious, beautiful literary legacy for us to untangle and solve as many times as we wish.

“The so-called enfants de Boches — roughly, children of the Huns — born during the war to French women and German soldiers, are seeking to fill a hole in their lives, hunting for long-lost German fathers they never knew and speaking openly of the maltreatment they suffered from their French neighbors. It is estimated that 200,000 children were born of these wartime love affairs.

Photos of the time depict young women, their heads shorn in shame, being hounded through villages, clutching the children of German fathers. About 20,000 women had their heads shaved. Many rejected the children, gave them up for adoption or placed them in orphanages.

But now these children, in their late 60s, are struggling to put their lives in order while there is still time. They have formed an association and sought the help of the German and French governments to try to identify their fathers, in many cases already dead, or families that their fathers founded in Germany after the war.”

Absolutely fascinating article on the children—now into their late middle-age—born to French women and German soldiers during World War II. According to the Times article, Germany has just begun issuing dual-citizenship to any child born of the two nationalities, signaling an acceptance of the liaisons. Of course, most of the negative feeling is on the French side, so the olive branch is somewhat nonplussing.