: Ludovic Bruckstein
: The Trap
: Istros Books
: 9781912545322
: 1
: CHF 3.00
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 190
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The Trap& The Rag Doll are two novellas by the Romanian writer Ludovic Bruckstein, that have remained undiscovered for many years. Both narratives are concerned with extraordinary stories of survival and struggle within the multicultural Transylvanian region during the time of Nazi occupation. The Trap is the story of Ernest, a young Jewish student from Sighet, who went into hiding in the mountains surrounding the town, when anti-Semitic persecutions began. From his hiding places he witnessed the fate of the Jewish population of the town until they are all sent away, in May 1944, in four long cattle-train transports to Auschwitz. Shortly thereafter, the Russian soldiers 'liberate' the town, and Ernest eagerly returns to his parent's house. However the Russians, suspicious of a young man that suddenly appears in town, out of nowhere, arrest him and exile him to a prisoner camp in Siberia! Critics saw in this last novel of his an allegorical rendering of the situation of many Jews, who, like himself, after World-War II, readily joined the 'World-Wide Communist Revolution' to avenge the atrocities of Nazism, only to find themselves trapped in cruel, dictatorial regimes that became suspicious of them and refused to allow their assimilation and integration, quite like the regimes before the war.

Ludovic Bruckstein was a Romanian/Jewish author and playwright who grew up in Sighet, in the Northern region of Transylvania, a town well known for its flourishing pre-war Jewish community and Hassidic tradition. Bruckstein edited a Yiddish newspaper called 'Our Life' (Unzer Lebn), and in 1947 he wrote a play, describing a Sonder-kommando revolt in Auschwitz. The play, titled 'The Night Shift' (Nacht-Shicht), written in Yiddish, was presented in Romania by both the Bucharest and Iassy Yiddish theaters, and was the first literary representation of this true event. His novels and stories are translated into Hebrew, French and English.

Foreword

 

Ludovic Bruckstein’sThe Trap andThe Rag Doll are both set during the Holocaust, the first in Sighet, the second in a nameless town very much like it, both of them part of the unique Jewish and multi-ethnic milieu that developed over hundreds of years in the northern Carpathians and Transcarpathia, a geographic area encompassing Galicia, Ruthenia, Maramuresch and Bukowina, regions that lie within present-day Romania, Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia. The history of Sighet (Marmaroschsiget), situated on the border with the Ukraine in present-day Romania’s Maramureș region, encapsulates both this lost multi-ethnic world and the twentieth-century catastrophes that were to destroy it: fascism and the Holocaust, followed by Red Army occupation and decades of totalitarian rule. Although it was once home to a thriving Jewish community, no more than a dozen Jews now live in Sighet, a town famous today for its prison, where, in the Stalinist period, inter-war democratic political leaders and other ‘enemies of the people’ met a brutal end and were buried in unmarked graves, and which is now a museum and Memorial to the Victims of Communism. At the turn of the twentieth century, the town, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was home to sizeable Hungarian, Romanian, German and Jewish communities. In 1920, following the Treaty of Trianon, the southern part of the Maramuresch region became part of Greater Romania, and twenty years later it was annexed to Hungary consequent to the Second Vienna Diktat. After the commencement of Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s invasion of the Ukraine, the Horthy regime rounded up a part of Sighet’s Jewish population in August 1941 and sent them in freight cars over the border to Kamienets-Podilskyi, where they were massacred along with Jews from the local ghetto and deportees from elsewhere in Hungary. In 1944, German forces occupied Hungary and, with the collaboration of local fascists, herded the Jews into ghettos. Over the course of a week in May 1944, the around thirteen thousand Jews who had been confined to the Sighet ghetto, under armed guard and enduring squalid, overcrowded conditions, were deported to Auschwitz on four trains of freight cars. The deportees included Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), who was to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and Yiddish and Romanian-language writer Ludovic Bruckstein (1920–1988).

Ludovic (Joseph-Leib) Bruckstein was born in Munkatsch (Mukachevo), a town in Ruthenia with a large Jewish population, some eighty miles north-west of Sighet, which during the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire became part of the newly established Czechoslovakia and then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the end of the Second World War. Like the Jewish population of Sighet, where the Bruckstein family moved after Ludovic was born, and of so many other similar towns across the region, the Jews of Munkatsch perished during the Holocaust, massacred by Einsatzgruppen or transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

In Sighet, Mordechai Bruckstein, Ludovic’s father, established a business, exporting locally picked medicinal herbs and producing walking canes in a small factory. Ludovic Bruckstein began to write fiction at an early age, thereby continuing a long family tradition of Hassidic storytelling, which he was later to describe in the short story ‘The Destiny of Yaakov Maggid’ (1973). Amaggid is a traditional Jewish storyteller, who narrates stories from the Torah and, in the case of the Hassidicmaggidim, hagiographic tales of the movement’s founder, Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), or the Baal Shem Tov, which means “Master of the Good Name.” Chaim-Josef Bruckstein, Ludovic’s great-grandfather, was an early Hassid, a follower of the Baal Shem Tov, and the author of a book titledTosafot Chaim (Life Glosses). His grandfather, Israel Nathan Alter Bruckstein, was a Hassidic rabbi in Pystin’, a town in Galicia, ninety miles north-east of Sighet, and wrote two books,Emunat Israel (