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Introduction: Arnost Lustig's Street of Lost Brothers
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17379 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1990 |
562 Words |
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Book World features the story "Red Oleanders" from Arnost Lustig's forthcoming collection, Street of Lost Brothers.
"Red Oleanders" is unusual - as a love story because its lovers are survivors of the Holocaust, and as a story of the Holocaust because it is about love. Yet, it is a universal love story dealing with the moral complexities of love between men and women whatever their circumstances.
This is a survivors' story: The protagonists have survived the Holocaust, and they do not dwell on the past. Rather, Lustig opens the story with a vignette about an old man who has fallen silent as times have changed and the words that expressed his experience of the camps have lost meaning. Through him, the reader grasps the pervasiveness of the Holocaust's unspoken influence on Daniela Klaus and Kamil Dreisler, the lovers in "Red Oleanders."
Lustig, himself a Holocaust survivor, finds in literature man's emotional memory: Where history falls short, literature is the last chance to keep the record straight. He is a deceptively simple writer who thrusts the reader into the action of a story as a participant or, at least, an eyewitness. His documentary-like realism interacts with his characters' stream of consciousness to create a kind of dreamtime in which historic events mingle with personal fate.
Arnost Lustig
Lustig is not nearly as well known in America as Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, but critics say that he is "too little known," "a major interpreter of
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