As with most of Sebald's work, the text includes many black and white, unlabeled photographs and strays sharply from general formats of plot and narrative.

He confides in Sebald about his Lithuanian Jewish family's immigration to England from Lithuania, and suspects that it is this secretive, alien past that contributed to the dissolution of his relationship with his wife.

Selwyn, and the other members of his household, were loosely based upon the family and staff who resided in the house in Wymondham (Norfolk, UK) in which Sebald rented a room when he first took up his post as a lecturer in European literature at the University of East Anglia, in 1970.

In later years, his eyesight began to fail and he moved to France, where he met and spent much time with Mme Landau, from whom the narrator obtains most of his information about Bereyter.

The narrator's great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, was the travelling companion of Cosmo Solomon, an affluent American aviator, gifted with much luck at gambling and a wayward attitude towards life.

In acknowledgement of this motif, Lisa Cohen of the Boston Review points out that The Emigrants' section-title characters "suffer[ ] from memory and from the compulsion to obliterate it; from a mourning and melancholia so deep that it is almost unnamable; from the knowledge that he has survived while those he loved have not; from problems distinguishing dream and reality; from a profound sense of displacement.

The English translation by Michael Hulse was first published clothbound by the Harvill Press in 1996, then issued as New Directions Paperbook 853 in 1997, in a cover designed by Semadar Megged.

"[9] Kirkus Reviews wrote: "The pervasive melancholy in these lives that are locked in tragedy is formidable, but at the same time the lyricism and immediacy of the narratives are marvelous to behold: a profound and moving work that should leave no reader unaffected.