Soul of Wood (New York Review Books (Paperback))

"I had, consecutively, been a sailor on a tugboat, an assistant to a spy, an employee in a food rationing office, a fisherman in the Mediterranean, a road worker in Jerusalem, a beach photographer in Tel Aviv...". Jakov Lind's capsule autobiography, of which this is only a part, omits his separation from his parents and escape from Vienna to Holland on a Kindertransport after the Anschluss, or the fact that the first three of these jobs were conducted in Nazi Germany, a Jew hiding in the enemy camp under a false name.Normally, I do not bother with an author's biography before reading his works, but Lind's case is different, because his wild, surreal, grotesque stories are only explicable -- perhaps only tolerable -- in the light of his own suffering and bizarre escape. One of the six shorter stories in this book, "Hurrah for Freedom," concerns a family of refugees from the Soviet Union who live together in an overheated barn, obese and naked, delightedly dining on their own children. Even freedom can exact too high a price. Cannibalism appears in one of the other stories too, as does a mass murderer, a former SS officer turned Jesuit priest without losing his taste for seduction, and a sleepless man's midnight encounter with God.The title story, the longest in the book, is basically a novella. It is not hard to see Jakov's own background in the opening situation of two Jewish parents departing by train for Poland, leaving their paralyzed son in the care of the one-legged WW1 veteran whom they have paid to look after him in secret. The veteran keeps his promise and conveys to boy to a hut in the mountains. But then the story turns surreal, as the boy undergoes a sudden transformation that can perhaps be understood as a metaphor for Jakov's own escape. Meanwhile, the focus shifts to the veteran who, well-meaning but weak, is inextricably drawn into participation in the Nazi killing machine. Then, with the war coming to a close, it becomes valuable to produce a Jew whose life has been saved, so he heads back to the mountain....But the most penetrating of these stories -- I won't say my favorite, since none of them can be called enjoyable -- may be the last, "Resurrection." Here is the arresting opening: "'Deum Jesum Christum in gloriam eternam est. Nu.' Goldschmied turned over on the other side, put down the prayer book, and tried to sleep." We are back in a place that Jakov Lind must have known well, a sealed-up closet in a boarding house in Holland. Goldschmied, who has been baptized a Christian and clings to his new faith like a life-line, is forced to share his hiding hole with a Jew named Weintraub, who is a liability because he is sick with tuberculosis. The dialogues between them about faith and the price of freedom go deeper than the Kafkaesque grotesquerie of the shorter stories. And the title comes to mean more than their release from the coffin-like closet.

... is small enough reward for having lived through Hitler's madness! When Jakov Lind published this collection of stories in 1962, at age 35, he had already outlived Hitler by seventeen years. Half his life! The first half had passed not without leaving its marks on his psyche, as these mind-wrenching stories attest. Even if you've read Keilson, Fallada, Koeppen, Grass, Joseph Roth, Sebald and other German-language writers who experienced the Nazi catastrophe firsthand, you'll find the novella "Soul of Wood" and the six shorter pieces that accompany it both disturbing and unique. There are fantastical elements in several of the stories that might be called "surreal" or perceived as grim revenants of Grimm tales. There are realistic absurdities and absurd realities, all expressed in language as fiercely flamboyant as the paintings of any German Expressionist. I don't want to spoil the shock of any of the larger pieces by summarizing them, but here's the shtick of "The Judgment", an eleven-page masterpiece:""A young man, a mass murderer of women, is awaiting execution in his cell. He grimly contemplates the satisfaction he'd get from being able to murder once more before being slain by the system, and eventually concocts a scheme to murder his own father, whom he blames for the failures of his life. Feigning repentance, he begs the Warden to grant him a last private interview with that Father. When the father is summoned to the prison for this interview, however, he accepts only for the chance to kill his son and erase his shame of parentage ....""And that's the least chilling story in the book!The author was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth on 10 February 1927 in Vienna. As an 11-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss, took refuge temporarily in Holland, but then succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity as "Jan Gerrit Overbeek." During the war, he worked on a barge in the Rhine, transporting goods between Holland and Germany. Of this period, Lind later wrote, "As Jan Gerrit Overbeek, I felt safe for the first time. It is crazy, walking around freely when one really should be sitting in a concentration camp. Crazy, perhaps, but a craziness that made me content, and happy." In 1945, Lnadwirth/Overbeek became Jakov Chaklan and made his way to Haifa. Thereafter he moved to Vienna for three years. In 1954 he settled in London, where he wrote the short stories of Soul of Wood plus other books in German: Landscape in Concrete, Ergo, plus a collection of essays in English.

Franz Kafka said, "What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide."A book has done that, and it is Jakov Lind's _Soul of Wood_.Perhaps it was Lind's extraordinary past that produced such extraordinary work: the boy was separated from his parents-- who emigrated to Palestine-- after the Nazis annexed Austria, and he went into hiding in Holland. He took on many identities throughout his life, and even worked for the SS. He moved to London, befriended Canetti, and then wrote in English, lamenting his loss of German and European culture. Stefan Zweig's suicide, which forever separated him from his homeland, comes to mind.I cannot put into words, at least not ones that rival Kafka's above, about how Lind's stories have touched me. They do, to be sure, affect me in a similar way as those of Kafka's absurdist works; I see Lind as a post-war Kafka, someone fully familiar with the chaos of the world and the ability to render it into almost perfect representational art. Lind's symbols, even ones as insane as a paralytic Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis at the top of an Austrian mountain with the help of a crippled WWI veteran (this is the background of the title story), will hopefully remain as prevalent as Kafka's human-turned-creature Gregor Samsa.

I had hoped to gain some insight into contemporary fantasy fiction but this was more black humour dealing with, I hope, a fiction about hiding Jews from deportation in Germany 39-45