Novel
See Under: Love
עיין ערך: אהבה
David Grossman · 1986
Synopsis
Jerusalem, the Beit Mazmil district, in the 1950s. Momik Neuman, a solitary schoolboy, son of survivors who tell him nothing of what they went through and speak in hushed tones of the Nazi Beast, sees arrive at his home Anshel Wasserman, his grandmother's brother, released from a psychiatric hospital, who speaks only in fragments and who was in Warsaw a successful author of children's stories. Momik invents his own version of the catastrophe and befriends a band of old survivors in the neighbourhood. Having become a writer, he will try to tell Wasserman's story.
Context
The novel was published in 1986, in 399 pages, and sold thirty-five thousand copies before the end of the year. It is made up of four parts, each with its own language: Momik, told from the child's point of view; Bruno, in which the adult narrator imagines that Bruno Schulz fled the Drohobycz ghetto by sea; Wasserman, in which the storyteller, in a camp, owes a story to Commandant Neigel; and an encyclopedia of Kazik's life. The first part was published separately as a novella and adapted for the stage.
Who it is for
A long novel in four parts of different forms, translated into French. It is better to know who Bruno Schulz, the writer from Drohobycz, was.
Prizes and reception
A critical and popular success: fifty thousand copies sold in two years; translated into English as early as 1989.