Shining examples of Yiddish storytelling
With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain
By Ludovic Bruckstein Istros Books, £9.99
The Trap
By Ludovic Bruckstein Istros Books, £9.99
Ludovic Bruckstein and Elie Wiesel were among 13,000 Jews deported from Hungarian-governed Sighet to Auschwitz in May 1944. Both survived to write about their experiences, Wiesel, most famously, in his 1960 Yiddish-language, Nobel Prize-winning book, translated into English as Night. Bruckstein’s 1945 dramatisation of the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz, NakhtShikht (Night Shift) was also written in Yiddish, but his novellas and stories, published in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, were written in Romanian and deal primarily with the period leading up to the deportations.
His evocations of Jewish life in the Carpathians, in his story collection: With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain are comparable to those of I L Peretz and Sholem Aleichem in Poland and Russia. Like them, Bruckstein is a secular maggid, a product of the Chasidic storytelling tradition, his cast of blacksmiths, porters, cabinet-makers, businessmen and schnorrers, remnants of a world on the brink of annihilation. All of them labour in vain, their common destiny the transport from Sighet to Auschwitz in that significant month of May 1944.
One story in the Unopened Umbrella anticipates Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Bruckstein’s narratives and descriptions are simple and direct, with the frequent twist of the terrible fate awaiting the protagonists, and not only in Auschwitz. The Vesuvio Division includes a sympathetic portrayal of musical Italian soldiers, which anticipates Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
Contrasted with thuggish Germans, and Hungarians far removed from those remembered nostalgically from the golden days of the benevolent Franz Joseph I, they are destined to perish on the freezing Russian steppe.
Israeli Holocaust survivors, returning to Germany in search of the location where they endured forced labour, are the subject of The Old Paper Factory, the collection’s strongest story. In it, Bruckstein questions the nature and fragility of memory, its uses and abuses.
The Trap is two novellas combined. In the first, also called The Trap, Ernst, a university student, disguises himself as a peasant and absconds to the forests outside Sighet rather than sew yellow stars to his clothes. From there, he witnesses the confinement of the town’s Jews (including his family) in the ghetto, followed by their deportation.
Salvation at the hands of the Russians is short-lived. He is sent to Siberia, victim of another totalitarianism.
Hanna, protagonist of The Rag Doll, the book’s second, more complex novella, also escapes her parents’ fate. Like Ernst, she eschews the yellow stars adopted by most of her community, though, by that time, to the distress of her parents, who have disowned her, she is married to the gentile scion of an aristocratic family.
Hanna survives the Nazis only for her marriage to dissolve. Her husband reverts to antisemitic stereotype and abandons her for a younger, gentile woman. Of Hanna’s two daughters, the elder, learning she is Jewish, reviles her mother in disgust while the younger accompanies her to an unknown destination.
Alistair Ian Blyth’s translations are elegant and readable. A version of his helpful introduction to the novellas might usefully have prefaced the short stories.