Soul Of Wood
  • Published: 15 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173305
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00

Soul Of Wood

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Soul of Wood made Jakov Lind’s reputation as one of the most boldy imaginative postwar writers and it remains his most celebrated achievement. In the title novella and six subsequent stories, Lind distorts and refashions reality to make the deepest horrors of the twentieth century his own.

 

Set during World War II, “Soul of Wood” is the story of Wohlbrecht, a peg-legged veteran of World War I, who smuggles Anton Barth, a paralyzed Jewish boy, to a mountain hideout after the boy’s parents have been sent to their deaths. Abandoning the helpless boy to the elements, Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna, where, having been committed to an insane asylum, he helps the chief psychiatrist to administer lethal injections to other patients. But Germany is collapsing and the war will soon be over. The one way, Wohlbrecht realizes, that he can evade retribution is by returning to the woods to redeem “his” hidden Jew. Others, however, have had the same bright idea.
  • Published: 15 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173305
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00
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Praise for Soul Of Wood

  • "'Soul of Wood' is emblematic of what Lind does best. He takes us from a world that can be seen and described in all its detail and complexity, into a world of inexplicable, magical events. The suddenness of this transition, and the absence of an explanation or a reorientation, is dizzying, but the reader is pulled along by the evenness of Lind's tone, as if nothing could surprise him...The effect is powerful and disturbing." --NextBook
  • "Jakov Lind is the greatest living writer of Jewish Europe...Lind doesn't deserve to be read--he's necessary, both in the vicissitudes of his life and, too, in the work it created. His books are the last late bloom of the European Jewish landscape, straining sunward through the concealing concrete." --Forward Magazine (A tribute to Lind on his 80th birthday, published 6 days before his death)"
  • This is a richness of meaning in these pages that demands reflection." --Chicago Daily News
  • "Behind the imaginative lunacy of Lind's novels and tales -- and he never permits us to forget it -- looms the historical deracination that inspired it." --The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination

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