Novel
Das große Protokoll gegen Zwetschkenbaum
Not translated into English
Albert Drach · 1964
Synopsis
A police record reports the case of Schmul Leib Zwetschkenbaum, a Talmudic student from Galicia, aged twenty-four, arrested as he sat under a plum tree for eating plums that did not belong to him. From this tiny offence springs a series of interrogations, transfers and placements that carries him through a collapsing monarchy and then into the first years after the war.
Context
Written in 1938 and 1939 in the south of France, where its author had taken refuge, the manuscript was turned down by sixteen publishers before a Munich publisher took it in 1964, as the first volume of the complete works of a writer whom nobody knew. Its success was immediate and rested on a misunderstanding: it was praised as a parody of the style of the imperial chancery, without seeing the harshness of its subject. It took the rediscovery of 1988 for this form to be read as a way of thinking and not as a pastiche.
Who it is for
Fewer than three hundred pages, but in an administrative language, long and impersonal, that demands endurance. The humour is black and never announces itself.
Prizes and reception
An immediate success on its publication in 1964, which made known a writer over sixty who had until then been unknown.
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