Search results for ""Author Ludovic Bruckstein""

The stories in this collection are stories of the lives and struggles of a wonderful variety of characters living in the Maramures region, in the years leading up to a war that will suddenly and irretrievably destroy the pattern of their existence. The eerily shocking ending of many of these stories is the moment their protagonists climb on the cattle trains to be transported to Auschwitz; while leaving the tale of their often tragic fate unstated. Bruckstein’s works, novels, stories and plays, deal with the sometimes cruel, sometimes comic, lives of simple people whose fate is controlled by highly unpredictable forces. These he describes with understanding, compassion and forgiveness; smiling at the petty worries and trivialities that people take so seriously, while often remaining unaware of very real and existential dangers. He belongs to a generation so well described by the writer Czeslaw Milosz, in his book, The Captive Mind: “Few inhabitants of the Baltic States, Poland or Czechoslovakia, of Hungary or Romania, could summarize in a few words the story of their existence. Their lives have been complicated by the course of historic events”.

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Bruckstein's two novellas, published for the first time in English, offer a fascinating depiction of rural life in the Carpathians around the time of the Second World War, tracing the chilling descent into disorder and fear of two cosmopolitan communities that had hitherto appeared to be havens of religious and racial acceptance, but which were in fact constructed on foundations of prejudice and discrimination. Bruckstein presents the effects of the Holocaust not only on the Jewish community, but also the wider Christian society. His novellas tell cautionary tales of how gradual changes that individually seem inconsequential can lead to catastrophic alterations in the very fabric of society which, by the time they are acknowledged, are irreversible. These stories serve as a warning that passivity and political apathy can sometimes be just as harmful as actions.

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Once again, the extraordinary storyteller, Ludovic Bruckstein, opens the door onto a lost world of Jewish history and lore in the central European Carpathian region, now parts of Hungary, Romania and Ukraine. Invoking the tales of a great maggid – a wandering storyteller within the East-European tradition of Hassidism - he weaves tales of wisdom and mystery which linger inside us long after the story has ended. Bruckstein's previous titles (The Trap, 2019 and With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, 2021) have gained him a growing audience of dedicated readers in the English-speaking world, where his work has been too-long absent. This edition comes complete with a fascinating glossary of terms and historical references complied by the translator.

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