An English translation of Slovak Jewish writer Leopold Laholas collection of short stories that face the atrocities and paradoxes of World War II.
Slovak Jewish writer Leopold Lahola was able to escape deportation to a concentration camp and fight in the resistance only to find himself forced into exile by the postwar communist regime. He emerged from obscurity during the brief thaw of the Prague Spring, when he was able to return to his homeland and thrive as a playwright and film director. It was also in 1968 that his short story collection The Last Thing appeared in Slovakia. The collections title proved sadly prophetic with the author suffering a fatal heart attack in January 1968, just before his 50th birthday and as his short stories finally appeared in book form.
The nine stories which make up The Last Thing range from the prewar rise of fascism and its dangers for the Jewish community through the concentration camps and the partisan fight against the Germans, concluding in the devastating awareness of all that had been lost and destroyed in the war. Lahola is a master of writing outside of conventional tropes, exploring moral ambivalences where others work within the comforts of good versus evil. He punctures the standard historical image of the partisan fighters by depicting their heroism along with their cruelty and pettiness while also showing how often bravery and madness, kindness and stupidity can coexist. Lahola has written a World War II story collection whose translation will offer not only a compelling read but starkly new perspectives on the tragedy and grandeur of that momentous time in history.
Recenzijos
"Leopold Lahola was and remains a miracle of Slovak literature. Literally! At the same time, his is the story of a writer who surpassed his countrymen so much that they temporarily forgot him. But only temporarily!" * Fedor Gįl, sociologist, politician, essayist and documentarian *
Gods Alley /7 Birdsong /26 Twenty-five blows /43 Salvo /69 The Last
Thing /82 A Conversation with the Enemy /109 Like a dog /152 In the first
person /169 The Funeral of David Krakower /185 Afterword: A birds eye view
that drills deep (Peter Darovec) /201
Leopold Lahola (1918-1968) was a Slovak Jewish fiction writer, playwright, and film director. He escaped deportation to a concentration camp and emigrated to Israel in 1949, where he worked in film before moving to West Germany. He was able to return home during the Prague Spring, when his plays were staged again in Czechoslovakia to critical acclaim. Julia and Peter Sherwood are based in London and work as freelance translators from and into a number of Central and East European languages. Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and spent more than twenty years in the NGO sector in London before turning to freelance translation some ten years ago. Peter Sherwoods first translations from the Hungarian appeared fifty years ago, but he was an academic for over forty years before retiring and devoting himself more or less full-time to translating.
