Nine o’clock, Father. Aslan called him Father because of the difference in their ages and in token of devotion and gratitude. Nine o’clock, eh? Wacholder was now able to shout, so he shouted.

Yes, nine o’clock, Father.

What about my tea?

Leo jumped out of bed again (has he gone plumb crazy?) and picked at his molar with satisfaction as Aslan obediently brought down his own tea. Aslan can do what he likes, I’m here to work.

Wacholder warmed his hands on the lukewarm tea. They’ve been here again, Aslan, the big black ones, do you hear. They’ve visited me again, Aslan, as big as gothic letters, up and down the wall of my heart, Aslan, up and down, and the Latin letters too, as green and thick as creepers. A whole bellyful, Aslan, it turned my stomach, Aslan. And then the rats, as big as big steamships, back and forth, back and forth. What do you think, Aslan, should I call the doctor?

Call the doctor, Father.

No, I won’t call the doctor. I’ve changed my mind. Let them crawl, let them bob up and down, let them gnaw and creep and root about. Let them hollow me out. Man is a pipe.

Yes, Father.

Man is a connecting pipe between feed trough and garbage pail. Here’s the trough and here’s the pail, and across here is man and they send things through him. A hose. You see what I mean?

Yes, Father.

Do I get Würz or don’t I?

Not for the present, Father.

He’s half my mutilated soul, do you understand that at least?

There’s something between the two of you. Something. Something that cuts across the river and through all the walls. An umbilical cord.

That’s it, Aslan. An umbilical cord.

You’re twins. Still unborn.

That’s it, my dear poet.

Nibbling in your sleep at the placenta of this world.

That’s right, Aslan, that’s right.

Floating in the dark, amniotic fluid . . .

Yes, Aslan, we’re both floating. I in my bleached wood fibers, in my glue, breathless, airless, and he over there on the other side in his mattress. Have you drafted the letter?

Here it is, Father. The seventy-fourth.

Let’s see.

Wacholder stared at the large sheet of paper crowded with writing and turned it in all directions. My eyes hurt. Read it to me.

Aslan read: Now, Würz, you’ve got to go. And quick. The house is on fire. Your face is black with smoke and soot. Get down to the river. You’re on fire. Into the sand with you. Put yourself out. Make it fast. Drop your brushes. Run. The beams are falling. Hurry. The housecleaning can wait. Out with you. The fire is consuming you. You’re half charred. You eggshell. You sheet of wrapping paper. You tree-stump goblin. You tin can. Run for your life. I’ll put you out in Greenland. Don’t be afraid. Seventeen years is enough. Hurry up. Yours, Wacholder. [. . .]

•

Fire didn’t worry him. Wacholder had used more effective threats. Cats, rats, ants, dynamite, floods. What worried him wasn’t the substance or the curses. What bothered him was that people didn’t take him and his work seriously. Ossias Würz was frantically busy making preparations for his seventeenth wedding anniversary. And now comes this letter, the seventy-fourth, and the preparations have to be postponed. As usual, he first put Wacholder’s letter in an envelope. So as not to forget it, he wrote Wacholder’s address on the outside (Alsterhof, City) and affixed a stamp. Only then did he start working on the answer.

Good Lord, Wacholder, what’s got into you again, what are you driving at with your fire? I’m burning with eagerness to do my work, and you want to smoke me out of here. How often must I tell you that I want to be left in peace? I need peace to do my peaceful work. I wish to build, not to sit around, to preserve, not to destroy. I am a man of progress, a man of the future, I have values, yes, values. I am the future. The future is I. Don’t you see that? Me, a sheet of wrapping paper, an eggshell, an empty tin can? And where do you get the tree-stump goblin? I’m telling you for the last time: my home is not a cave. This is no womb, it doesn’t smell of sweat and blood, of milk and urine, of afterbirth and yesterday. Don’t make me think of those things, I’m always thinking of them. And when I think of them, I feel as I did then. It was an uninterrupted movement of the lips, eating deeper and deeper into the flesh. It was hunger, lust. If you remember, stop remembering. Those were the lip-smacking years, but we didn’t get fat. Not I. Did you? It took me a long time, but now I know. It’s no good chasing after your daily bread, don’t move from your four walls. Exertion is a waste of energy. I have all nature delivered to my back door. Here in my home it’s chopped small and grated fine, crushed and salted, boiled and eaten. I’ve got my domestic animals in jars and bottles. That’s the way to do it. And the beauties of nature aren’t lacking either. I have butterflies in tissue paper, a marten and a fox on top of the cupboard, two elks, a roe and a bear on the wall. A swallow and a sea gull under glass. And it’s all fresh and clean. Here I can breathe. I don’t need your Greenland or your river, and I can do without your caf.. What would I do in your caf.? What have you to offer me? A noise that’s always in my ears? Faces that smack their lips and talk and stare at me, that I see the whole time as it is? What have you got out there that I haven’t got in here?Neatness and order are freedom, that’s why I stay here.

�������� at checkout to get 30% off.

And then the unexpected happened. From a hole in the ground no bigger than a fox’s burrow popped a creature with his finger pressed to his lips. Pst, pst, he went, and a man, small, dark, and skinny, crawled out of the hole, shook his fist in Bachmann’s stomach and yelled: You’re caving in my entrance, you damn fool.

Get away from me, you! Bachmann was scared stiff. He hauled off and poked his stick into the ghost’s side. It writhed with pain and made faces. You’ve hurt my kidney, the critter whimpered. Good, said Bachmann and got ready to strike again. Then it dawned on him: the ghost spoke his mother tongue. You’re not a mole?

Me a mole? Are you crazy? I’m a German.

A German? Bachmann wasn’t going to be made a fool of. He was delirious with hunger. In such a state, he knew, all sorts of things can happen. The critter held his side and limped around him in a circle.

You’re a liar! Whish! He tried to shoo him away, but the little fellow kept nimbly beyond his reach. Whish, Bachmann went, get away! He spun around, brandishing the stick. How can it be a German? Must be some cross between a man and a beast, like those mongrels that sometimes get born in out-of-the-way places.

But I am a German. We talk the same language, don’t we? The argument had its effect. Standing by the entrance to the burrow, Bachmann lifted his right boot. Don’t, the other cried out. Don’t do it! That’s my home! His home? ran through Bachmann’s head, then he must be lying. That’s no kind of home for a human being. He brought his right boot down with full force. The boot vanished in the ground. The construction was frail, further proof that the whole thing must be a trap. [. . .]

What’s your name?

Xavier Schnotz, my company is over there. He pointed in the direction from which Bachmann had come. You know that? Bachmann was amazed. You know that and you stay here? I didn’t see a thing. I haven’t met a soul in a whole month. If it weren’t for the planes, I’d have thought I was dead long ago. The Elysian fields.

Don’t insult the fields, said Schnotz. Without these fields I’d have been dead long ago. Do you realize how warm it is down there?

No.

Plenty warm. You’re a stinker. You’ve wrecked my house. But I won’t go with you. If you keep on going, you’ll be at the border by tonight. Without me. I’m staying here until it’s over. Have to dig myself a new hole. It’s too risky in the hut.

Hut?

Too risky, I tell you. It’s up against the wall for the like of us, or the noose.

Bachmann stood up: I’m beginning to catch on. You’re a deserter.

Sure, what else.

And I thought you were lost. So you’re a deserter. That’s great.

Schnotz detected something wrong in the tone.

What do you mean: So you’re a deserter? What are you, a Wehrmacht patrol?

Not at all. But I’m not a deserter either. Not by a long shot. The opposite. I’m looking for my regiment.

I don’t get you.

Oh yes, you do. I’m looking for my regiment. And if I don’t find my own, I’ll join another. Been on sick leave long enough. High time I was doing something.

Schnotz was thunderstruck. He must be pretty far gone. Or he’s an informer. Crazy idea. They wouldn’t send out an informer like that. [. . .]

What Bachmann was telling him struck him as so implausible that he didn’t trust his ears. Plan A, said Bachmann, is maybe the simplest. I creep into an army camp at night and hide in the cellar. I wait for a fresh batch of recruits to turn up, and as soon as I hear them marching through the gate, I pop out. I wait till they’re in the shower room, naked everybody looks alike. Then to the quartermaster’s, I draw a new uniform, and I’m in the clear. Sure, I lose my rank, but I get a second chance. That’s worth the sacrifice. What I need is an old camp building with as many passages, rooms, and storerooms as possible. You don’t think much of it, I can see that by your face. Plan B. Combat situation. It’s hard to get there. There are sentries, patrols, and manned trenches all over. But once you’ve broken through, you’re in the clear. After that you just have to show you’ve got what it takes. I’m no coward, friend, you can take my word for it. Mortars and such things don’t scare me. The more noise there is the better I like it. You don’t know me. The only part I don’t go for is wet trenches and mud. Aside from that any kind of terrain suits me. Once the fighting is over, I lay my cards on the table. I tell them frankly who I am—but they reward me for bravery in battle. My discharge is canceled. It stands to reason; because I proved I’m a man, I showed them I’ve got what it takes. I’ll even come in for a decoration. But that’s not what I’m out for, don’t get that idea. [. . .]

Plan C, Schnotz, may sound fantastic. But it has its points. Would you kindly cut out sniffing and running around? Listen to me, you can learn a thing or two. I’ll need a military cemetery. I pick out a suitable spot between two graves and bury myself. Like you in your fox burrow. Only I can’t afford to leave such a big hole. The air shaft mustn’t be any bigger than a water-pipe with a diameter of two and a half inches. Otherwise people would notice it. So I lie in this grave and wait for a funeral. I’ll need about a dozen people in civilian clothes. Uncles, aunts, parents, and such. As soon as the services start, in between the priest’s blessing and sermon—before the visitors and relatives have recovered from their emotion—I rise up out of the grave. Anyone who sees a soldier in uniform rising out of the grave is bound to stand up for him. People can’t say no to a soldier with catalepsy, that’s a safe bet, they’re too sentimental. And what does the man want? Nothing, except to be marked fit for active duty. He wants to join his buddies at the front. It’s sure to work, there’s only one possible hitch.

Use at checkout to receive 30% off.��

(The Book of Numbers, Witz) wrote an amazing introduction for our��edition of Landscape in Concrete.��Given the sales history, I’m 160% certain that the vast majority of you have never read this. Do it! Do it now! Give me this one thing! Because after you read this? You’re going to want to read the book.��

Which, brings me to today’s mini-schedule. Later today I’ll post excerpts from��Landscape in Concrete��and��Ergo.��And assuming it’s OK with NYRB,��I’ll run a bit from����next week. (The only [?] author that NYRB and Open Letter have in common?)

Read Jakov Lind!��

[Ed. Note: I��love��that cover. That’s peak Open Letter design right there. Now on to the intro!]

“Jakov Lind” was a pseudonym for a man without a name. According to the rolls of a host of long-since defunct regimes, “Lind” was once known as Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian Jew (this was back when you could be one of those), and before that he was Jan Gerrit Overbeek, Dutch bargehand, which was the Nazi-era identity of Heinz Landwirth, Viennese. The author of Landscape in Concrete—and also of the stories of Soul of Wood, the novel Ergo, two other novels, another collection of stories, an Israeli travelogue, three memoirs, numerous stage and radio plays, and occasional poetry—might have been all of these people, and he might have been none. This is not meant “deconstructively,” however, or in a spirit of relativism. What’s being asserted here, at the beginning, is trauma. Is not knowing what to call one’s self. Is not having a private name for one’s self.

Landwirth was born in 1927, the year of the first trans-Atlantic telephone call, the year that television was first publicly demonstrated. Lindbergh flew to Paris; Trotsky was ousted from the Communist Party. This was not long after the collapse of the monarchy—the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dissolution, through the first of the wars, from a relatively unified official culture, German-speaking, German-writing, into a smattering of countries impoverished with insular nationalisms. The author’s closest affinities lay here, with the ideal Habsburgs in their tubercular, war-wounded death throes; his childhood ailment is the Proustian languor, the mourning of a past always near, strangely distant, unlived and yet, lost: “If I’m sick I vomit broken china and golden frames,” he writes in the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy. “What, if not handmade in the nineteenth century, is my Middle European soul?”

The work published under the name Jakov Lind has its deepest roots in a land—in a landscape, a Landschaft—that doesn’t exist, in a time that had disappeared a decade before the author’s birth. There’s a reason that Middle Europe isn’t a name featured on maps, since it can be anything, anywhere, in the mind. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal tells us that Mitteleuropa ends at the last Empire train station (which would mark that terminus in Lviv, now in Ukraine); Thomas Mann once proclaimed that Germany was wherever he was—a delusional, denying hope whose reification would have exiled the capital of the neighboring Reich, if temporarily, to Pacific Palisades, California. Lind offers a description of his impossible habitus in the second of his two German novels, Ergo, originally published as Eine bessere Welt (A Better World): “A town made of Liptauer cream cheese, Lipizzaner horses and Lilliputians of roast chicken, bauernschmaus, liver dumplings and liver sausage, a rhyme, a phrase, a proverb and perhaps not even that but only a waistline, a shoe size, a collar size, a hat size and perhaps not even that but only the family vault of Maria Theresa and Franz Josef and the children Kalifati, Ruebezahl, Krampus, and Nikolo Christkindl and Andreas Hofer, who died of scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox and Basedow’s disease.”

(Before we go any further, it should be said that Lind’s autobiographies, written in English in London, are the only sources for information about Lind, and also about Landwirth, Overbeek, Chaklan, et al. How reliable they are depends exclusively on one’s sense of humor.) His father, their father, “was a Viennese businessman without much business in the world. Half Luftmensch and half duke.” A traveling salesman, Simon “claimed to be selling��underwear to nuns.” Patrimony lay in Galicia, far over the Tatra Mountains in Poland, which would make Landwirth père a true Viennese. By contrast, the portrait of the author’s mother, Rosa née Birnbaum, is hazier; she “had no money, four children, and no help in a three-room flat.” She was known as “the Saint. The Good One. The Strong One. The Patient One.” The marriage was relatively happy; Landwirth was mothered by sisters—he would always be surrounded by women.

The author’s war departs from this domesticity, never regained. With Hitler returning to annex his homeland, Landwirth was sent to the Netherlands on a Kindertransport, along with a sister (Ditta). His parents managed to make it to Palestine, where their ship, refused port by the British, was bombed by the Haganah. Landwirth boarded for a time at a Zionist farming school in Gouda, desultorily training for his own resettlement. When that school was shuttered amid Nazi occupation, Landwirth went underground (1943 marks the end of his formal education). Angered by the complacency of the Dutch Jews, who, he thought, were just waiting for their deportations east, Landwirth purchased appropriate papers and became Jan Overbeek; the young Dutchman explained his native German by claiming an Austrian mother, which was “true.” As Overbeek, the author found work on a barge, plying the Rhine from the Hook of Holland down to the Ruhr Valley—one of the most postcard-perfect parts of the Reich. On furlough, Overbeek contracted the clap from a prostitute, and was ordered to a sanatorium to recover. There, he was recruited by a scientist-soldier to serve as a personal courier in an office attached to Das Metallurgische Forschungsinstitut des Reichsluftfahrtministeriums, “The Institute for Metallurgical Research of the Imperial Ministry of Air Traffic.” When Allied bombs are��falling even by day, and Berlin’s being threatened, what’s a Jew passing under false papers to do? Overbeek mimicked a Nazi. It’s unconscious, Lind tells us; one nods and obeys, one adapts.��Overbeek had no way of knowing that this Nazi scientist, who refused to allow Overbeek any contact with friends (and certainly not with any female friends), was spying on the Reich’s nuclear program, making reports on the progress of the Cyclotron to the British.

In summation: A Viennese teenager turned Dutch bargeworker turned employee of the German military machine, Overbeek was also an unwitting accomplice to espionage. “I liked Berlin. My job was hardly strenuous. I had to take some letters to certain officials in the Air Ministry on Friedrichstrasse. I delivered my letters in large brown envelopes, turned about, and said good-bye.”

As “the German Empire was disintegrating faster than any empire before it,” what were Overbeek’s thoughts? “My mind was on girls and how to find them. How to find them first and how to find a place to take them to.”

In 1945, amid debellatio, the author was off to the Netherlands again, then to France, hoping to make his European escape. Palestine was the idea, but thanks to another forged passport (reading Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian)—and to his manifold languages, all stamped with an accent that seemed to be Dutch—British Intelligence, then controlling the French border, refused to believe that he was a Jew. At Maubeuge, Chaklan dropped his pants—his circumcision was, apparently, convincing. He took passage to Haifa, only to find his father ill, his mother dead, his sisters miraculously grown up. A kibbutz drove him crazy, as did the religious, and so, with his name forever converted, if not his soul, he eventually, reluctantly, vagabonded his way to London. (With Lind, flux was the norm: wandering, fleeing, life lived as a sort of refugee-tourism; before settling in London, amid émigré-rich Hampstead, alongside the likes of Erich Fried and Elias Canetti, Lind crisscrossed the Continent: Vienna, Copenhagen, Paris. Occupations: in Palestine, beach photographer, fruit picker, air-traffic controller; in Europe, acting student, actor, private detective, journalist, literary and film agent, husband and father. First wife: Ida; second wife: Faith.)

London was also where the writing began—drafts initially intended, according to Lind, less for the proof that is publication than as an experiment, an interrogation accomplished on paper. Though he’d been writing fragments for years—beginning diaries then abandoning them when the poetry became too personal and the philosophy muddled in language—could Lind write fiction, could he write fiction that was truer than fact and in German, the murderers’ tongue?

*

Which brings us to Landscape in Concrete (Landschaft in Beton, 1963), Lind’s second published book and the novel that cemented his reputation after the freak, international success of the great, short-form Soul of Wood. Landscape concerns one Gauthier Bachmann of Duisburg-on-the-Rhine, an aspiring gold- and silversmith, and an oafish sergeant in the German army. The setting is Eastertide, 1944. As the book opens, Bachmann’s just been released, or has escaped, from a sanitarium at Oppeln (known as Opole, in Poland), where he’d been recovering from a humiliating defeat at Voroshenko, a Soviet forest in which his entire regiment is said to have drowned in the mud—763 of them dead in the first five minutes of battle, as he tells it once, or within three hours, as he tells it another time, in October 1941.

Lind’s novel narrates Bachmann’s pitiful attempts to rejoin that Second Hessian Infantry Regiment, Eighth Battalion, or, failing that, to join any detachment that would have him and his formidable size (six-foot-two, three-hundred pounds; he’s often described as a bear) and talents (Bachmann is in possession of the gold star for marksmanship; for “shooting twelve Russian monkeys off a roof” at Stalino, today Donetsk, in Ukraine).

Bachmann’s picaresque takes him through the Ardennes (which turn out to be his ancestral region; his forebears had been Flemish), then to arctic Narvik, Norway, and finally back to Germany, to his original station in Honnef, all the while being fooled, manipulated, used, debased. As obedient and as loyal as a golem, intending only to serve, Bachmann acts as an impromptu executioner for a Norwegian madman, the former schoolteacher and current war profiteer (and double agent), Hjalmar Halftan. As Bachmann the soldier becomes Bachmann the multiple murderer, the absurd is reasserted. Criminality is only a question of context; after all, the Holocaust was legal, as are most wars. Individual hypocrisy is institutionalized as public chaos, through the total perversion of language: “Let me be a simple, normal, intelligent human being,” Bachmann says. “That’s plenty.”

Besides the naïve, Nazi-Svejk Bachmann, and the “angekok” Halftan (who, it’s noted, has the same first name as the president of the Reichsbank), essential characters include: Xaver Schnotz, a poisoner and army deserter; Peter von Göritz, a predatorily homosexual Major; the Elshoved family of Norse nobles; and Helga Okolek, Bachmann’s Behemoth girlfriend, “Aryan” but with a Slavic surname. Supporting appearances are made by a lesbian gynecologist-landlady (murdered) and a Bulgarian Gypsy violinist (arrested).

As Bachmann marches east at novel’s end to rejoin his regiment at the front—after it’s officially ruled that he is, in fact, not insane and will not be discharged, as he’d suspected, as he’d feared—Lind’s landscape is momentarily barren (“The sun hovers red and flat in the sky, unwilling either to rise or to set.”) and the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that its author survived.

The book’s closing section concerns an air-raid, and makes glancing mention of Rhenish barge-life, a scene of near-autobiography representative of Lind’s style (and, typically, Ralph Manheim’s translation is a marvel):

In the grass by the river bank [Bachmann] opened his coat and tunic, pushed up his sweater and undid two shirt buttons. He wanted to feel his heart with his fingers. The heat of the day lay heavy, like too much tenderness, over the gray and green colors of the Rhine. The ticking he heard was the engine of a barge. Then with wide-open eyes he saw more barges floating through the mist that rose from the water. They’re carrying fuel to hell and stones for the wall of the city of the dead. Desertion leads to a quarry. Branches growing out of the clouds. Schnotz says: Your turn will come. What’s written on the barges? Basel, Rotterdam. Aha! Secret names of the gates to the other world. Cement, stones, sand. A giant is carrying them through the water on his shoulders, wading step by step through the mud. A fool. Who told him to do that? If he’d pick up the cargo and throw it all overboard, and if the other giants did the same, we’d all be saved. The chunks of red meat would be cleared away. The crime can be discovered any day. What then? Upstream and downstream they go, day after day like galley slaves, they would have the power to sweep away the danger. Only the giants are strong enough. I’m one of them. When it is all put under the concrete and the sun shines fiercely on it, nobody’ll know any more what’s underneath. The corpus delicti will be gone. Nothing is more dangerous than sitting still. I’m shoving off.

A word about style, then we’ll shove off.

One’s war became one’s writing. If the Holocaust is to be regarded as a perfection of Europe—technologically speaking, especially—then the writing of the Holocaust might represent a perfection of European culture: Accounts of the tragedy have almost always been technically sterile, stylistically orderly, factual. Classical, Apollonian, to a fault. Elie Wiesel’s memoirs, to take as example the most popular, have found, within the camps, amid the gas chambers and ovens, an order to obey the logic of humanistic experience. Wiesel’s sentences and paragraphs tried, and still try, to impose reason—a reason derived from a reverence of tradition, of continuity, in the face of diabolical incoherence. His works are resultantly direct, in-line, accounted-for; nowhere has Wiesel allowed evil to invade the flesh of his French prose. Hell is the subject, then, and not the object. But Lind’s war was not survived in a camp. There was no Appell for Lind, no line-ups, no count-offs; there was no order in his survival, and so no order in his prose. His writing is disorganized, ungrammatical (Lind’s German was brilliant but, in every respect, adolescent). His war was riven with evasions and impersonations, and so, too, is his fictional landscape. He is the one Jewish novelist of the Holocaust who, in a major European language, expressed the Holocaust not through language, but in language. As language. (One has to read in Yiddish to find anything comparable.) To be sure, this was aestheticizing horror. To be sure, this is what writers do. Or are supposed to do.

My generation (I was born in 1980) is the last to know the survivors of the Holocaust, to know them as grandparents, as great-uncles, and -aunts. I know them as rigid, parsimonious. Frightened. They are old, but they seem to have always been old. They count the matches in matchboxes, save teabags for second and third steeps. They raised families, they continue to raise grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as if to replace the dead. Lind was not like them. He could never settle down; he abandoned women, divorced wives. He scraped by, drank, smoked cigarettes, marijuana. Psychological treatment intended to exorcise wartime memory included LSD experiments intravenously perpetrated by a certain Dr. Ling; this was in an era when no English-language magazine or newspaper could refer to London without calling it “Swinging London,” the latter 1960s. Macho, mustachioed Lind was garrulous, and, once published, famous. He summered in Mallorca, negotiated unsuccessfully with Hollywood. When in New York he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. How many survivors were also hippies? How do you say “hippie” in German? Hippie. (Though “flowerchildren” sounds more menacing, archaic: Blumenkinder.)

Not all translations are so perfect, however. Lind writing in English, which he did from 1969, was yet another “Lind”—displaced from German, distant from its slangs, forced to the cooler imagination of what was his fourth fluent language (German, Dutch, Hebrew, English). If the enduring Soul of Wood was the beginning, Ergo marked the end of his fictional promise, and only memoir could follow, written in a knowing, polished version of what London’s German-speaking “expatriates” called “Emigranto”—what Lind once referred to as “DENGLISH oder ANGLO DEUTSCH.” Counting My Steps, Numbers, and Crossing were those memoirs. The other, slighter, novels were Travels to the Enu and The Inventor, which went almost unreviewed. In the 1990s Lind got sick; good friends and editors died by the year. Before Open Letter decided to bring them back into print, the only available English-language copies of Lind’s novels were used: $1 each, over the Internet; two memoirs I purchased for that sum at Manhattan’s Strand bookshop had even been autographed (“To Albert,” “To Alfred”).

A draft of this introduction was written as an essay for The Forward, intended to mark Lind’s 80th birthday; it was published a week before his death. Three or four people (older, huskily-voiced women) phoned me after that, telling me how kind Lind was to them in New York, how funny he was, how they regretted they “never got around to reading his novels.” But fiction followed by fact that must, in turn, be followed by silence, disappearance, neglect, and regret is a reduction we readers cannot accept, or allow—though that might have been the daily-felt fate of the writer. “Jakov Lind” doesn’t just deserve to be read; he’s necessary, both in the vicissitudes of his life and, too, in the work he created. His books are a late bloom of the European Jewish landscape, straining sunward through the concealing concrete.

Joshua Cohen

12/2008

Brooklyn, NY

As always, for all this month, you can get of both of his books ( and��) by using LIND at checkout.

Next week we’ll run a long post (and excerpt) about��Landscape in Concrete��and one about��Ergo��the Friday after that, so for today, I just want to quote (extensively) from his fascinating . If you haven’t heard of Lind before, you’re in for a ride.

Jakov Lind, one of the greatest of post-war writers, who bore witness through his darkly surreal and imaginative tales to the madness of our time, was born Heinz Landwirth on February 13, 1927 in Vienna. On March 13th, 1938 the Nazis marched into Austria. “The war against the Jews began practically the next morning”, wrote Lind. “By Saturday all of Vienna was one big swastika.” It was no longer safe to be a Jew in Austria. In December of 1938 Lind and his sisters were placed on a kindertransport (children’s train) bound for Holland. He was eleven years old.

In as yet unoccupied Holland, Lind learned fluent Dutch in a matter of weeks. He lived in a Zionist children’s home near the Hague and was later taken in by a Dutch Jewish family. In 1941, he found himself in a Zionist training camp where young “pioneers” received agricultural training to prepare for emigration to Palestine (already forbidden by the Nazi authorities.) After witnessing the first mass roundup of Jews in 1943, Lind made the decision to go underground in June 1943 and obtained false identity papers in the name of Jan Gerrit Overbeek, Dutch laborer. On the way to get his papers, Lind writes: “I pinned my Nazi badge up front, put on my grey hat with the brim down, tied a black tie over my dark grey shirt, and looked like a Nazi home from a spell of duty. I put on a fierce look, and left for Line 3 . . . Office workers and labourers on the streetcar moved away from me . . .”

Several months later Lind found work on a river barge transporting goods between Holland and Germany, “sailing under a false self”, he later wrote. But when the Allied bombing attacks began on the industrial cities along the Rhine, it was time to get off the river. It was then that a miracle, as he referred to it, brought him a job as a courier for the German Air Ministry. [. . .]

In 1954 Lind landed in Dover, made his way to London and decided to stay. There he married Faith Henry and had a son, Simon, and a daughter, Oona. Settled in London, he began work on a collection of short stories. Eine Seele aus Holz (Soul of Wood), published in Germany in 1962, was proclaimed a masterpiece, became an immediate literary phenomenon, and was translated into fourteen languages. As one critic wrote: “Lind’s general theme is the destruction of European Jewry . . . He treats it with a kind of broad gallows humor, utterly grotesque and fascinating . . .”

Compared to Kafka, Grass and Gogol, Jakov Lind became an international literary star overnight. But he did not want to be a German writer. It felt like betrayal to write in German, his mother tongue which had so recently been put to such murderous use.

Lind’s second novel, Landscape in Concrete was published in 1963. Ergo, a novel, came out in 1968 and became a successful play produced by Joseph Papp in New York. In 1965 and 1968 The Silver Foxes Are Dead and Other Plays were published and performed as radio plays in Germany. And then, encouraged by his publisher, a major shift occurred. Lind wrote his first book in English, Counting My Steps (1969), an autobiography of his childhood in Vienna and his war years in the Netherlands and Germany. This was the beginning of Lind’s distancing himself from his mother tongue and the pain and ambivalence of writing in German. But it also distanced him from his roots. “Madder than anything”, he wrote, “was to think I could ever unlearn sounds I knew by heart and kidneys and replace them with other and better sounds.”

Lind was to write three more autobiographies: Numbers (1972) on his wanderings across Europe after the war; the Trip to Jerusalem��(1973); and Crossing: The Discovery of Two Islands (1991) about his arrival in England and the years in London and New York. In the 1980’s Lind published a novel, Travels to the Enu: The Story of a Shipwreck (1982), The Stove (1983), a series of short parables, and The Inventor (1987), an epistolary novel, all of them written in English and translated into many languages. [. . .]

On February 16, 2007, Jakov Lind, one of the major literary figures of our time, died in London of heart failure. He was 80 years old.

Here’s a link to his , and if you’re intrigued, I��highly��recommend staring with��, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim . . . or��his translation of��.��And remember: use LIND and get 30% off!

Tomorrow at 7pm at El Beit on Bedford and North 8th in Williamsburg, Josh Cohen (the author of the critically acclaimed ) will be leading a discussion about “Jakov Lind, absurdist literature, war, and Jewish writing about WWII and Europe.”

Josh is a bright guy, so I’m sure this will be really interesting. And Lind was an amazingly eccentric writer. We’ve published two of his books — and — and NYRB brought out .

We’ve posted Lind’s bio on here probably a half-dozen times, but it’s so interesting and strange that it’s worth restating. From the NYRB site:

Jakov Lind (1927-2007) was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth into an educated Jewish family in Vienna. After the 1938 Anschluss, Lind and one of his sisters were sent for safety to Holland, from where they were join their parents in Palestine; this proved impossible, and following the occupation of Holland, Lind, who was already fluent in Dutch, had no choice but to go into hiding. Taking the name of Jan Gerrit Overbeek—”sailing under a false self,” as he would later describe it—he worked on a barge traveling up and down the Rhine. When the Allies began to bomb the industrial cities of the Rhine, Lind/Overbeek moved to Germany, where he was employed by a Nazi government ministry in Berlin. The end of the war allowed Lind to join his family in Palestine, but it was not long before he returned to Europe, studying drama in Vienna and, in 1954, settling in London, where he began work on the stories that were published in 1962 as Soul of Wood. Lind’s other books in German include the novels Landscape in Concrete and Ergo and, in English, four volumes of autobiography, two novels, and numerous stories. Lind was also a playwright and film director, as well as a talented visual artist. In a eulogy delivered at Lind’s funeral, Anthony Rudolf described Lind as “A coyote, a trickster…. A wicked smile played around his mouth, while witty aphorisms and deep insights tripped off his lips. He emanated inner strength—and an electric intelligence that we all wanted to emulate.”

Another interesting thing about Lind is how much he looked like Georges Perec in certain pictures.

Anyway, this event sounds brilliant, and if I lived in New York, or if the high speed rail from Buffalo to NYC was completed (ha!), I’d totally be there.

is one of the writers who memorialized Lind (accidentally memorialized, as it turned out), and he was kind enough to agree to write an introduction to our edition of Landscape. We thought it would be appropriate to remember Lind today by posting that introduction, to give everyone who reads this blog a chance to discover this incredible novelist and extraordinary man:

*

“Jakov Lind” was a pseudonym for a man without a name. According to the rolls of a host of long-since defunct regimes, “Lind” was once known as Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian Jew (this was back when you could be one of those), and before that he was Jan Gerrit Overbeek, Dutch bargehand, which was the Nazi-era identity of Heinz Landwirth, Viennese. The author of Landscape in Concrete—and also of the stories of Soul of Wood, the novel Ergo, two other novels, another collection of stories, an Israeli travelogue, three memoirs, numerous stage and radio plays, and occasional poetry—might have been all of these people, and he might have been none. This is not meant “deconstructively,” however, or in a spirit of relativism. What’s being asserted here, at the beginning, is trauma. Is not knowing what to call one’s self. Is not having a private name for one’s self.

Landwirth was born in 1927, the year of the first trans-Atlantic telephone call, the year that television was first publicly demonstrated. Lindbergh flew to Paris; Trotsky was ousted from the Communist Party. This was not long after the collapse of the monarchy—the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dissolution, through the first of the wars, from a relatively unified official culture, German-speaking, German-writing, into a smattering of countries impoverished with insular nationalisms. The author’s closest affinities lay here, with the ideal Habsburgs in their tubercular, war-wounded death throes; his childhood ailment is the Proustian languor, the mourning of a past that’s always near, strangely distant, unlived and yet, lost: “If I’m sick I vomit broken china and golden frames,” he writes in the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy. “What, if not handmade in the nineteenth century, is my Middle European soul?”

The work published under the name Jakov Lind has its deepest roots in a land—in a landscape, a Landschaft—that doesn’t exist, in a time that had disappeared a decade before the author’s birth. There’s a reason that Middle Europe isn’t a name featured on maps, since it can be anything, anywhere, in the mind. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal tells us that Mitteleuropa ends at the last Empire train station (which would mark that terminus in Lviv, now in Ukraine); Thomas Mann once proclaimed that Germany was wherever he was—a delusional, denying hope whose reification would’ve exiled the capital of the neighboring Reich, if temporarily, to Pacific Palisades, California. Lind offers a description of his impossible habitus in the second of his two German novels, Ergo, originally published as Eine bessere Welt (A Better World): “A town made of Liptauer cream cheese, Lipizzaner horses and Lilliputians of roast chicken, bauernschmaus, liver dumplings and liver sausage, a rhyme, a phrase, a proverb and perhaps not even that but only a waistline, a shoe size, a collar size, a hat size and perhaps not even that but only the family vault of Maria Theresa and Franz Josef and the children Kalifati, Ruebezahl, Krampus, and Nikolo Christkindl and Andreas Hofer, who died of scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox and Basedow’s disease.”

(Before we go any further, it should be said that Lind’s autobiographies, written in English in London, are the only sources for information about Lind, and also about Landwirth, Overbeek, Chaklan, et al. How reliable they are depends exclusively on one’s sense of humor.) His father, their father, “was a Viennese businessman without much business in the world. Half Luftmensch and half duke.” A traveling salesman, Simon “claimed to be selling underwear to nuns.” Patrimony lay in Galicia, far over the Tatra Mountains in Poland, which would make Landwirth père a true Viennese. By contrast, the picture of the author’s mother, Rosa née Birnbaum, is hazier; she “had no money, four children, and no help in a three-room flat.” She was known as “the Saint. The Good One. The Strong One. The Patient One.” The marriage was relatively happy; Landwirth was mothered by sisters—he would always be surrounded by women.

The author’s war departs from this domesticity, which he never regained. With Hitler returning to annex his homeland, Landwirth was sent to the Netherlands on a Kindertransport, along with a sister (Ditta). His parents managed to make it to Palestine, where their ship, refused port by the British, was bombed by the Haganah. Landwirth boarded for a time at a Zionist farming school in Gouda, desultorily training for his own resettlement. When that school was shuttered amid Nazi occupation, Landwirth went underground (1943 marks the end of his formal education). Angered by the complacency of the Dutch Jews, who, he thought, were just waiting for their deportations east, Landwirth purchased the appropriate papers and became Jan Overbeek; the young Dutchman explained his native German by claiming an Austrian mother, which was “true.” As Overbeek, the author found work on a barge, plying the Rhine from the Hook of Holland down to the Ruhr Valley—one of the most postcard-perfect parts of the Reich. On furlough, Overbeek contracted the clap from a prostitute, and was ordered to a sanatorium to recover. There, he was recruited by a scientist-soldier to serve as a personal courier in an office attached to Das Metallurgische Forschungsinstitut des Reichsluftfahrtministeriums, “The Institute for Metallurgical Research of the Imperial Ministry of Air Traffic.” When Allied bombs are falling even by day, and Berlin’s being threatened, what’s a Jew passing under false papers to do? Overbeek mimicked a Nazi. It’s unconscious, Lind tells us; one nods and obeys, one adapts. Overbeek had no way of knowing that this Nazi scientist, who refused to allow Overbeek any contact with friends (and certainly not with any female friends), was spying on the Reich’s nuclear program and making reports on the progress of the Cyclotron to the British.

In summation: A Viennese teenager turned Dutch bargeworker turned employee of the German military machine, Overbeek was also an unwitting accomplice to espionage. “I liked Berlin. My job was hardly strenuous. I had to take some letters to certain officials in the Air Ministry on Friedrichstrasse. I delivered my letters in large brown envelopes, turned about, and said good-bye.”

As “the German Empire was disintegrating faster than any empire before it,” what were Overbeek’s thoughts? “My mind was on girls and how to find them. How to find them first and how to find a place to take them to.”

In 1945, amid debellatio, the author was off to the Netherlands again, then to France, hoping to make his European escape. Palestine was the idea, but thanks to another forged passport (reading Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian)—and to his manifold languages, all stamped with an accent that seems to be Dutch—British Intelligence, then controlling the French border, refused to believe that he was a Jew. At Maubeuge, Chaklan dropped his pants—his circumcision was, apparently, convincing. He took passage to Haifa, only to find his father ill, his mother dead, and his sisters miraculously grown up. A kibbutz drove him crazy, as did the religious, and so, with his name forever converted, if not his soul, he eventually, reluctantly, vagabonded his way to London. (With Lind, flux was the norm: wandering, fleeing, life lived as a sort of refugee-tourism; before settling in London, amid émigré-rich Hampstead, alongside the likes of writers Erich Fried, and Elias Canetti, Lind crisscrossed the European continent: Vienna, Copenhagen, Paris. Occupations: in Palestine, beach photographer, fruit picker, air-traffic controller; in Europe, acting student, actor, private detective, journalist, literary and film agent, husband and father. First wife: Ida; second wife: Faith.)

London was also where the writing began—drafts initially intended, according to Lind, less for the proof that is publication than as an experiment, an interrogation accomplished on paper. Though he’d been writing fragments for years—beginning diaries then abandoning them when the poetry became too personal and the philosophy muddled in language—could Lind write fiction, could he write fiction that was truer than fact and in German, the murderers’ tongue?

*

Which brings us to Landscape in Concrete (Landschaft in Beton, 1963), Lind’s second published book and the novel that cemented his reputation after the freak, international success of the great, short-form Soul of Wood. Landscape concerns one Gauthier Bachmann of Duisburg-on-the-Rhine, an aspiring gold- and silversmith, and an oafish sergeant in the German army. The setting is Eastertide, 1944. As the book opens, Bachmann’s just been released, or has escaped, from a sanitarium at Oppeln (known as Opole, in Poland), where he’d been recovering from a humiliating defeat at Voroshenko, a Soviet forest in which his entire regiment is said to have drowned in the mud—763 of them dead in the first five minutes of battle, as he tells it once, or within three hours, as he tells it another time, in October 1941.

Lind’s novel narrates Bachmann’s pitiful attempts to rejoin that Second Hessian Infantry Regiment, Eighth Battalion, or, failing that, to join any detachment that would have him, and his formidable size (six-foot-two, three-hundred pounds; he’s often described as a bear) and talents (Bachmann is in possession of the gold star for marksmanship; for “shooting twelve Russian monkeys off a roof” at Stalino, today Donetsk, in Ukraine).

Bachmann’s picaresque takes him through the Ardennes (which turn out to be his ancestral region; his forebears had been Flemish), then to arctic Narvik, Norway, and finally back to Germany, to his original station, in Honnef, all the while being fooled, manipulated, used, debased. As obedient and as loyal as a golem, intending only to serve, Bachmann eventually acts as an impromptu executioner for a Norwegian madman, the former schoolteacher and current war profiteer (and double agent), Hjalmar Halftan. As Bachmann the soldier becomes Bachmann the multiple murderer, the absurd is reasserted. Criminality is only a question of context; after all, the Holocaust was legal, as are most wars. Individual hypocrisy is institutionalized as public chaos, through the total perversion of language: “Let me be a simple, normal, intelligent human being,” Bachmann says. “That’s plenty.”

Besides the naïve, Nazi-Schweik Bachmann, and the “angekok” Halftan (who, it’s noted, has the same first name as the president of the Reichsbank), essential characters include: Xaver Schnotz, a poisoner and army deserter; Peter von Göritz, a predatorily homosexual Major; the Elshoved family of Norse nobles; and Helga Okolek, Bachmann’s Behemoth girlfriend, who’s Aryan but has a Slavic surname. Supporting appearances are made by a lesbian gynecologist-landlady (murdered), and a Bulgarian Gypsy violinist (arrested).

As Bachmann marches east at novel’s end to rejoin his regiment at the front—after it’s officially ruled that he is, in fact, not insane and will not be discharged, as he’d suspected, as he’d feared—Lind’s landscape is momentarily barren (“The sun hovers red and flat in the sky, unwilling either to rise or to set.” ) and the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that its author survived.

The book’s closing section concerns an air-raid, and makes glancing mention of Rhenish barge-life, a scene of near-autobiography representative of Lind’s style (and, typically, Ralph Manheim’s translation is a marvel):

In the grass by the river bank [Bachmann] opened his coat and tunic, pushed up his sweater and undid two shirt buttons. He wanted to feel his heart with his fingers. The heat of the day lay heavy, like too much tenderness, over the gray and green colors of the Rhine. The ticking he heard was the engine of a barge. Then with wide-open eyes he saw more barges floating through the mist that rose from the water. They’re carrying fuel to hell and stones for the wall of the city of the dead. Desertion leads to a quarry. Branches growing out of the clouds. Schnotz says: Your turn will come. What’s written on the barges? Basel, Rotterdam. Aha! Secret names of the gates to the other world. Cement, stones, sand. A giant is carrying them through the water on his shoulders, wading step by step through the mud. A fool. Who told him to do that? If he’d pick up the cargo and throw it all overboard, and if the other giants did the same, we’d all be saved. The chunks of red meat would be cleared away. The crime can be discovered any day. What then? Upstream and downstream they go, day after day like galley slaves, they would have the power to sweep away the danger. Only the giants are strong enough. I’m one of them. When it is all put under the concrete and the sun shines fiercely on it, nobody’ll know any more what’s underneath. The corpus delicti will be gone. Nothing is more dangerous than sitting still. I’m shoving off.

A word about style, then we’ll shove off.

One’s war became one’s writing. If the Holocaust is to be regarded as a perfection of Europe—technologically speaking, especially—then the writing of the Holocaust might represent a perfection of European culture: Accounts of the tragedy have almost always been technically sterile, stylistically orderly, factual. Classical, Apollonian, to a fault. Elie Wiesel’s memoirs, to take as example the most popular, have found, within the camps, amid the gas chambers and ovens, an order to obey the logic of humanistic experience. Wiesel’s sentences and paragraphs tried, and still try, to impose reason—a reason derived from a reverence of tradition, of continuity, in the face of diabolical incoherence. His works are resultantly direct, in-line, accounted-for; nowhere has Wiesel allowed evil to invade the flesh of his French prose. Hell is the subject, then, and not the object. But Lind’s war was not survived in a camp. There was no Appell for Lind, no line-ups, no count-offs; there was no order in his survival, and so no order in his prose. His writing is disorganized, ungrammatical (Lind’s German was brilliant but, in every respect, adolescent). His war was riven with evasions and impersonations, and so, too, is his fictional landscape. He is the one Jewish novelist of the Holocaust who, in a major European language, expressed the Holocaust not through language, but in language. As language. (One has to read in Yiddish to find anything comparable.) To be sure, this was aestheticizing horror. To be sure, this is what writers do. Or are supposed to do.

My generation (I was born in 1980) is the last to know the survivors of the Holocaust, to know them as grandparents, as great-uncles, and -aunts. I know them as rigid, parsimonious. Frightened. They are old, but they seem to have always been old. They count the matches in matchboxes, save teabags for second and third steeps. They raised families, they continue to raise grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as if to replace the dead. Lind was not like them. He could never settle down; he abandoned women, divorced wives. He scraped by, drank, smoked cigarettes, marijuana. Psychological treatment intended to exorcise wartime memory included LSD experiments intravenously perpetrated by a certain Dr. Ling; this was in an era when no English-language magazine or newspaper could refer to London without calling it “Swinging London,” the latter 1960s. Macho, mustachioed Lind was garrulous, and, once published, famous. He summered in Mallorca, negotiated unsuccessfully with Hollywood. When in New York he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. How many survivors were also hippies? How do you say “hippie” in German? Hippie. (Though “flowerchildren” sounds more menacing, archaic: Blumenkinder.)

Not all translations are so perfect, however. Lind writing in English, which he did from 1969, was yet another “Lind”—displaced from German, distant from its slangs, forced to the cooler imagination of what was his fourth fluent language (German, Dutch, Hebrew, English). If the enduring Soul of Wood was the beginning, Ergo marked the end of his fictional promise, and only memoir could follow, written in a knowing, polished version of what London’s German-speaking “expatriates” called “Emigranto”—what Lind once referred to as “DENGLISH oder ANGLO DEUTSCH.” Counting My Steps, Numbers, and Crossing, were those memoirs. The other, slighter, novels were Travels to the Enu and The Inventor, which went almost unreviewed. In the 1990s, Lind got sick; good friends and editors died by the year. Before Open Letter decided to bring them back into print, the only available copies of Lind’s novels were used: $1 each, over the Internet; two memoirs I purchased for that sum at Manhattan’s Strand bookshop had even been autographed (“To Albert,” “To Alfred”).

A draft of this introduction was written as an essay for The Forward, intended to mark Lind’s 80th birthday; it was published a week before his death. Three or four people (older, huskily-voiced women) contacted me after that, telling me how kind Lind was to them in New York, how funny he was, how they regretted they “never got around to reading his novels.” But fiction followed by fact that must, in turn, be followed by silence, disappearance, neglect, and regret, is a reduction we readers cannot accept, or allow—though that might have been the daily-felt fate of the writer. “Jakov Lind” doesn’t deserve to be read, he’s necessary, both in the vicissitudes of his life and, too, in the work he created. His books are a late bloom of the European Jewish landscape, straining sunward through the concealing concrete.

Joshua Cohen
12/2008
Brooklyn, NY

And indeed, after witnessing unbelievably shocking scenes, it is hard to regain a grasp on real, ordinary life. Such is Bachmann’s lot. A sergeant in the German army, he has, as the book begins, just fought in a battle at Voroshenko and seen his entire regiment slaughtered, sunk in a quagmire of blood and mud.

Throughout the book, Lind then dips us, episodically, into the hell of Bachmann’s post-traumatic existence and his logical/illogical flight back to what he knows. Against “human” nature he wants willfully to expose himself again to the horror of war; in this sense perhaps he is ill: unwilling or incapable of caring; unable to hope. He has seen friends and countrymen blown to bits; what reason is there to live? He is filled with uncertainty too: about what constitutes a “man,” whether or not he is one, whether he is diseased, dead or alive, real or make-believe. Returning to the simple order that the army offers is perhaps all he has to hang on to, because good, honest, stable “normal” life and relationships aren’t found in the world he now inhabits.

Voroshenko renders Bachmann “unfit for duty.” Despite this, he journeys throughout the Ardennes in quest of a fighting unit he can once again join; to which he can “belong.” Neither “spiteful nor kind, rascal nor honest man, hero nor insect,” Bachmann stoically sinks into depravity, abdicating responsibility for his actions, numbly stumbling around, Lear-like, encountering and succumbing to the wishes of evil, indecent characters, willing to do anything to fill the void.

Bachmann, unlike the Underground Man, acts. But he acts in the wrong way. No one, Victor Frankl tells us, in Man’s Search for Meaning, has the right to do wrong. Bachmann does wrong. He acts indecently.

The first person he meets is a mole of a man, Xaver Schnotz, who has deserted his nearby unit after poisoning a kitchen worker to death with “piptol.” Here, exampling Lind’s blunt descriptive powers, is how it works:

“Your eyes crawl out of their sockets like snails and they can’t get back in. (He tittered.) Your tongue gets stiff and hard as shoe leather, black leather, and your nostrils contract so tight you couldn’t stick a needle in, they close up as if there’s never been any holes, your ears hang down like dry leaves, and your hands cramp up like this, they turn into claws (he demonstrated, tittering again), and then, very very slowly, you suffocate. That’s piptol, friend.”

Starving, Bachmann and Schnotz engage in a frantic, hilarious fight over who gets to eat the liver of a freshly bagged chicken. The next day Bachmann turns Schnotz back into the authorities in hopes of securing a commission for himself. Commander Von Goritz tests Bachmann by ordering him to execute a saboteur who looks “strikingly like Schnotz.” Bachmann obeys, and, despite guilt, justifies his actions, Nuremburg-style, by telling himself that he is just following orders. His warped enterprise, the gaining of purpose through re-enrollment in the army, trumps any humane instincts he may have once owned. Whenever behavior doesn’t align with belief, self-hatred will follow, and illness is sure to be near; as Dostoevsky put it: can those who enjoy the feeling of their own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for themselves?

The grizzly slide into depravity continues as Bachmann is later ordered to kill Baron Elshoved and members of his family:

Cut him open, came Halftan’s placid voice. With his left hand Bachmann held the back of Thor’s neck and with his right cut him open from throat to abdomen. He had to step aside quickly, for the blood gushed like a spring when the stone is taken away. A man is full of blood, the way a balloon is full of air. It was always fun to burst balloons, it made a bang, it was exciting. A man doesn’t make any bang. Thor wheezed and collapsed. The knife had gone through part of his windpipe. Bachmann let him down slowly with his left hand. Woudn’t want the poor kid to fall on his head.

Here is the written equivalent it seems of Francis Bacon’s raw, Godless depiction of man as no more than blood, guts, and intestines in his painting Three Studies for a Crucifixion.

Bachmann is calm after the abattoir. But he has no monopoly on depravity. Others in fact descend deeper into the pit, showing us “the plague called man.” The remaining daughter Gudrin, for example, steps forward, unafraid, expressing pleasure at her family’s slaughter . . . “That’s what I’ve always longed for . . .” and a willingness to be taken. Though Halftan had thought of it often, of taking her by cajolery, by force, “now that there’s nothing more to fear, neither parents nor brothers, now that I could kill her, I don’t want her any more.”

The nadir is reached at the end of the book, as Bachmann, after an air-raid shatters a blissful togetherness with his girlfriend, ravishes her. “Behind closed eyelids he saw the brown Cyclopses of her breasts, he slid over the bloated white body, grazed the reddish weeds that grew out of the hollow, and dwelt at length on the fattened turkey backs of her haunches.”

Landscape in Concrete is filled with appropriately harsh, disturbing passages like these. At times the similes don’t quite work, “Bachmann was heavy and shapeless, like the clouds that covered the fields . . .” but for the most part they do, and there are passages in this book which affect, as Kafka tells us important work should, “like a disaster, that grieves us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.”

Read and be affected by it, but as an antidote, remember that life is not what happens to us—but rather, how we choose to respond.

Nigel Beale is a freelance writer/broadcaster who specializes in literary journalism. His articles and reviews have appeared in, among other places, The Washington Post, The (Manchester) Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Bookseller, BorderCrossings and Canadian Art magazines. In his role as host of radio program he has interviewed many of the world’s most admired authors; plus publishers, booksellers, editors, book collectors, librarians, conservators, illustrators, and others connected with the book. (We’ve posted about a few of his interviews, including the one I did, this recent one with Ha Jin, and the hysterical one with John Metcalf. )

Here’s the opening of his review of Lind’s creepyfunny WWII novel:

We meet a familiar angst-ridden Russian early in the pages of Jacov Lind’s novel Landscape in Concrete: Dostoevsky’s Underground man surfaces in the guise of Gauthier Bachmann to here tread the desolate earth of the Ardennes during WW ll. No longer confined by inertia to his wretched little room, this protagonist is on the road—a bleak, inhuman, carnage scarred road—blindly journeying in search of meaning and identity. It’s as if the contents of a diseased mind have spilled out into the real world.

And indeed, after witnessing unbelievably shocking scenes, it is hard to regain a grasp on real, ordinary life. Such is Bachmann’s lot. A sergeant in the German army, he has, as the book begins, just fought in a battle at Voroshenko and seen his entire regiment slaughtered , sunk in a quagmire of blood and mud.

Throughout the book, Lind then dips us, episodically, into the hell of Bachmann’s post-traumatic existence and his logical/illogical flight back to what he knows. Against “human” nature he wants willfully to expose himself again to the horror of war; in this sense perhaps he is ill: unwilling or incapable of caring; unable to hope. He has seen friends and countrymen blown to bits; what reason is there to live? He is filled with uncertainty too: about what constitutes a “man,” whether or not he is one, whether he is diseased, dead or alive, real or make-believe. Returning to the simple order that the army offers is perhaps all he has to hang on to, because good, honest, stable “normal” life and relationships aren’t found in the world he now inhabits.

Voroshenko renders Bachmann “unfit for duty.” Despite this, he journeys throughout the Ardennes in quest of a fighting unit he can once again join; to which he can “belong.” Neither “spiteful nor kind, rascal nor honest man, hero nor insect,” Bachmann stoically sinks into depravity, abdicating responsibility for his actions, numbly stumbling around, Lear-like, encountering and succumbing to the wishes of evil, indecent characters, willing to do anything to fill the void.

Bachmann, unlike the Underground Man, acts. But he acts in the wrong way. No one, Victor Frankl tells us, in Man’s Search for Meaning, has the right to do wrong. Bachmann does wrong. He acts indecently.

Click here for the full review.

Lind is not only a major post-Holocaust writer; he is also a modernist of extraordinary talent and vision. His writing shows an intriguing, Beckettian dissolution of reason, and it owes a clear debt to the absurdists, whose themes of obsession and the perversion of reality closely resemble Lind’s work. Born in Vienna a decade before the Anschluss, Lind also owes something also to the Austro-Jewish literary tradition exemplified by Stefan Zweig—there’s a humanist regard that colors his work and tinges his cynicism with a smirking regret. This sort of weeping giddiness characterizes all of Lind’s writing, from his excellent dramatic efforts like The Silver Foxes Are Dead to his short stories and his extraordinary dark novels. [. . .]

Reading Lind, it becomes clear that he—like so many of his fellow Jews—never recovered from the Shoah that he somehow missed; his books are stuffed with the madness of that time, of hiding in plain sight, of those dark circumstances. Somewhere in life’s meaninglessness, through LSD and hashish and stunningly good humor, Lind tried to find some structure, something beneath the insanity to cling to and make real. He found logic, because logic exists even divorced from reason. It’s from this bizarre worldview, from this confusion of ideas, that Lind wrote some of his best work. [. . .]

In a time when Günter Grass’s is seeing a revival in an inspired new translation by Breon Mitchell, and when other lost post-Holocaust literature is reemerging (for example, the recently published, gorgeous by Hans Fallada), there is no better time for the reading public to reengage with this scarred, deeply alone survivor of tumultuous times. A writer who blended the deranged freedom of the 1960s and the death of reason in the 1940s into an extraordinary understanding of humanity in all its hopeful and idealistic depravity, Jakov Lind wrote the kind of books that are not to be missed.

Obviously biased, but this is a great list, with Jakov Lind’s wondrously bizarre Macedonio Fernandez’s an anthology with Words Without Borders, Jorge Volpi’s , and the first complete translation of Ilf & Petrov’s

Enjoy!