Istros Books – serie

In this exuberant and touching portrait of youth, Eliade recounts the fictional version of his university years in late 1920’s Bucharest. Marked by a burgeoning desire to ‘suck out all the marrow of life’, the protagonist throws himself into his studies; engaging his professors and peers in philosophical discourse, becoming one of the founding members of the Student’s Union, and opening---up the attic refuge of his isolated teenage years as a hotspot for political debate and romantic exploration. Readers will recognize in these pages the joy of a life about to blossom, of the search for knowledge and the desire for true love. Already an accomplished writer as a young man, this follow-up to his Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent reveals a keen observer of human behaviour, a seeker of truth and spiritual fulfillment whose path would eventually lead him to become the ultimate historian of 20th-century religions.

Pavel Vilikovský’s novella Fleeting Snow (Letmý sneh, 2014), depicts the gradual loss of memory of the narrator’s wife. The narrator reminisces about his past life with his wife and muses on issues ranging from human nature and the soul, to names and the phonetics of Slovak and indigenous American Indian languages, in an informal, humorous style whose lightness of touch belies the seriousness of his themes. The book’s title refers to its recurring central motif, an avalanche whose inexorable descent cannot be stopped once the critical mass of snow has begun to roll, echoing the unstoppable process of memory loss. Five themes or storylines, intertwined in passages of varying lengths, are labelled with letters of the alphabet and numbers in a playful allusion to scholarly works and musical compositions.

“A world without truth would be an immensely sad place,” states the magistrate in the murder trial of local boy, Janek. A young man with serious mental issues, Janek weaves a ‘chestnut crown’ from the leaves of a supposedly sacred tree in a attempt to rid himself of the demons of the past through a pagan ceremony. The crown is later found on the body of the farmer Geder - stabbed to death with a bread knife. Through a series of flashbacks during the subsequent interrogations, we learn of Janek’s story: from the perversion of his relationship with his mother, to the frustrations of his love affair with Daria and his inability to complete his studies or free himself from the ghosts which haunt him. A Swarm of Dust is widely considered to be one of Flisar’s finest works of fiction, questioning the very notion of objective truth and subverting the norms of Judeo-Christian morality.

The protagonist in Dogs and Others is the first openly lesbian character in modern Serbian literature, but she is also so much more than that, as she encapsulates the zeitgeist of her generation. Coming of age in 1970s Belgrade, then the capital city of thriving, socialist Yugoslavia, we follow Lida and the bohemian life she leads, made more complicated by the trials and tribulations of her eccentric family. The whole novel breathes with a raw sensibility so aptly captured in the voice of the heroine — a striking, rebellious, overtly feminist and somewhat neurotic young woman.

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”.

In the northern Slovenian city of Murska Sobota stands the renowned Hotel Dobray, once the gathering place of townspeople of all nationalities and social strata who lived in this typical Pannonian panorama on the fringe of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Due to its historical and geographical particularities, the town had always been home to numerous ethnically and culturally mixed communities that gave it the charm and melos of Central-European identity. But now, in the thick of World War II, the town is occupied by the Hungarian army.Franz Schwartz’s wife, Ellsie has for the past month been preparing their son Isaac, a gifted violinist, for his first solo concert, which is to take place at Hotel Dobray. Isaac is to perform on his bar mitzvah and his 13th birthday on April 26, 1944. When the German army marches into town and forces all Jews to display yellow stars on their clothes, Ellsie advises her husband that the family should flee the town and escape to Switzerland. Schwartz promises her he will obtain forged documents, but not before Isaac performs his concert at the hotel.A year later, in March 1945, Schwartz returns, on foot, from the concentration camp as one of the few survivors.

The End. And Again is a novel about war, romance and rock ’n’ roll. It takes us back to Ljubljana and the Balkans in late 1980s and early 1990s through the reminiscences of an embittered bureaucrat Peter, a corrupt manager Goran and eternal runaway Mary. After taking a fateful bus ride, Mary once fell in love with Denis, a passionate rock musician, but their love story was tragically cut short when she, a young missionary, was ordered to leave the country for violating the Mormon code, and Denis was cast from his peaceful life in Ljubljana, exiled and sent tumbling into the ravages of the Balkan war.The main character’s memories of the years when their interests revolved more around their band, music and above all love than around the turbulent political situation that derailed their lives, intersect with those of Denis in the maelstrom of war.A lack of any meaningful resolution to their story haunts them all and forces them to search for a different end(ing). (And) Again.

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.