Book World features the story "Red Oleanders" from Arnost Lustig's forthcoming collection, Street of Lost Brothers.
"Red Oleanders" is unusual - as a love story because its lovers are survivors of the Holocaust, and as a story of the Holocaust because it is about love. Yet, it is a universal love story dealing with the moral complexities of love between men and women whatever their circumstances.
This is a survivors' story: The protagonists have survived the Holocaust, and they do not dwell on the past. Rather, Lustig opens the story with a vignette about an old man who has fallen silent as times have changed and the words that expressed his experience of the camps have lost meaning. Through him, the reader grasps the pervasiveness of the Holocaust's unspoken influence on Daniela Klaus and Kamil Dreisler, the lovers in "Red Oleanders."
Lustig, himself a Holocaust survivor, finds in literature man's emotional memory: Where history falls short, literature is the last chance to keep the record straight. He is a deceptively simple writer who thrusts the reader into the action of a story as a participant or, at least, an eyewitness. His documentary-like realism interacts with his characters' stream of consciousness to create a kind of dreamtime in which historic events mingle with personal fate.
Arnost Lustig
Lustig is not nearly as well known in America as Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, but critics say that he is "too little known," "a major interpreter of man's tragic situation," "far beyond the existential despair that has become a familiar refrain of our time." He "deserves a large readership" and "merits the deepest attention." In his fiction, "The tragedy of a specific people becomes…the tragedy of man."
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1926, Lustig was imprisoned in Theresienstadt in 1942, then in Auschwitz, and in Buchenwald. He survived three years in the camps before escaping while being transported to Dachau. Returning to Prague, he fought with the Czech Resistance in the last days of the war. After the war, he continued in Prague working as a reporter, screenwriter, and novelist. He was a moving force behind Czech New Wave Cinema, and five of his novels were made into prize-winning films.
Lustig published his first book in 1958; his defiance of social realism revealed him as daring from the start. Between 1958 and 1968, when his books were banned in the aftermath of Prague Spring, some five hundred thousand copies were sold in Czechoslovakia - a country of roughly fourteen million people. His novels have been translated into twenty languages.
Today Lustig teaches literature and film at American University in Washington, D.C. Seven of his books are available in English: Darkness Casts No Shadow, Diamonds of the Night, Night and Hope, The Unloved, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, Dita Saxova, Indecent Dreams, and Street of Lost Brothers, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
In this issue
Following "Red Oleanders," Czech
...
Read Full Article
|
