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

These documents include articles on workmen’s compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka’s writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk.

(And I always heard you excavate quarries better after having a few . . . )

To celebrate this release, Nextbook has been running a five-part series by Joshua Cohen about the office writings and its relation to Kafka’s other works:

Kafka’s office writings, as presented here, cannot be read on their own (they are incomprehensibly boring) but, instead, must be read as companions, to demystify the three novels and stories (which are anything but boring). Taken together, though, both workaday fact and masterwork fiction create a network of connections that exposes not just the concerns of a single writer, but also that of a singular culture—the culture of the Office, which has imposed itself on what used to be our lives.

The fifth part isn’t online yet (I’ll update this post when it goes live), but parts 1-4 are available at the following links: and

[Update: Part 5 — is now available.]

First up is a reprint of Jakov Lind’s Landscape in Concrete, which will come out in March. (We’re also bringing out Ergo next fall, around the same time that the New York Review Books brings out Soul of Wood.)

Lind died last February, and it was the wave of fascinating obituaries that caught our editorial interest. Before picking up a single title, I was intrigued by his very strange biography. From the at Lind’s funeral:

Where does the story begin? Jakov was born in 1927 in Vienna into an assimilated Jewish family. A few months after the Anschluss in 1938, his parents sent him on a children’s transport to Holland. There he joined one of many Zionist farms or training centres across Europe, in preparation for kibbutz life in the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine. As we know from his fascinating and sophisticated autobiographies written in English, the tough-minded teenager, at odds with those Dutch Jews who did not resist deportation, went underground. He survived the war in Germany as a Dutch merchant seaman on a barge. He tells us that it was safer for a Jew to be in Germany “inside the lion’s mouth” rather than in Holland, where you would feel “its teeth and claws”. He even survived a physical examination when he checked into a hospital for venereal disease. “What, that too?” said the male nurse with a laugh, after inspecting the culprit.

The mutability of identity is a common theme throughout Lind’s life and work. In fact, Jakov Lind is actually a pseudonym—as Sasha Weiss details in her he was born Heinz Landwirth, changed his name to Jan Overbeek when he pretended to be Dutch seaman, and then became the author Jakov Lind.

In addition to his works of fiction—which are strange, brilliant books that can be a bit disturbing, but are also very funny in a sort of Beckettian way—he also wrote a “memoir trilogy” consisting of Counting My Steps, Numbers, and Crossing. And relating to his shifting identity and background, he wrote all of these in English.

Landscape in Concrete is set during World War II and features Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann, a totally unhinged German soldier who was discharged for insanity. The book opens with him wandering the forests searching for any company that will take him and let him participate in the war—as a German man it’s his duty to fight. Along the way he literally stumbles into Schnotz, a deserter and poisoner who is hiding in a hole in the woods waiting for the war to end. This excerpt features the beginning of their conversation.

The book gets darker and more odd as it develops, and as various people manipulate the hapless Bachmann. He’s very innocent at the beginning of the novel, but war can change people . . .

For more information about Lind and his works I’d also recommend checking out Joshua Cohen’s article written shortly before Lind’s passing.

(Before going any further, I think it’s worth pointing out that Cohen rivals Three Percent fave Ben Lytal in the sheer number of literary translations he reviews.)

Cohen has mixed feelings about both books (but prefers The Pathseeker, calling it “the less surprising but ultimately more impressive fiction”), and about the quality of the translations.

But what I find most interesting is this:

I would like to say two words about the business and translation of books. One: Knopf — the American publishing house that has published more Nobel Prize-winner works than any other — has published Detective Story and is marketing it as a novel. And, Melville House — a small press based in Brooklyn — has published The Pathseeker as the debut of a series called “The Contemporary Art of the Novella.” It should be noted that in this instance, the novella is longer and more complex than the novel, which has been called what it’s not if only to help with its sales. Such are the hopes of multinational publishing. That Kertész has chosen to publish independently is laudable; Knopf was unwilling for reasons that were undoubtedly economic, or foolish.

There’s also a great quote from Kertesz about the first translations of his books (Fateless and Kaddish for a Child Not Born—is there a reason it’s not “for an Unborn Child”?) that were published by Northwestern some years back:

“I really tried to protest against the first translations, but I found complete rejection. The publisher was not willing to do new translations. It was a really bad feeling. It was as if you had a very sane character who has a rendezvous with the reader and the person who shows up is basically a real jerk, with a stammer, bad breath and a foul mouth.”

A surprise to probably no one, the book sounds awesome:

Nazi Literature in the Americas, first published in Spanish in 1996, is not a work of nonfiction, though it reads as an encyclopedic history, or a biographical dictionary of criminous thought. [. . .]

What Bolaño has given us is a mock reference text, an indispensible companion to the work of collaborationist poets and novelists in the Americas — writers who, whether actively or through aesthetic allegiance, kept company with the Nazi cause. Included and representative are entries on “The Mendiluce Clan”: Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, an austere “lady poet”; Juan Mendiluce Thompson, her son, an angry novelist who denounced Julio Cortázar and his mentor Borges, “whose stories, so he claimed, were ‘parodies of parodies’”; and Luz Mendiluce Thompson, the family’s obese poet-daughter, who cherishes throughout her life a photograph of her baby self being cradled by Hitler.

One of the best aspects of the review is the passing reference to a joke manifesto Bolano once wrote:

Bolaño seems to have summarized his own life in the prankish manifesto for the literary movement he founded, “Infrarealism”: “Experience at full tilt, self-consuming structures, stark raving contradictions . . .”

Later in this document (of which Bolaño was the sole author and signatory), he wrote: “Risk is always elsewhere. The true poet is always leaving himself behind.”