|
“A fascinating work... Achieves the height of virtuosity”, Le Monde
“A feat of love and tolerance”, Washington Post
“An elegant translation” Jewish Review of Books
“A marvellous translation” Christian Science Monitor
“An able and practised translator” Times Literary Supplement
Ludmila Ulitskaya
has earned accolades abroad for this groundbreaking work, at last
available in English. The novel tells the story of Daniel Stein, a
Polish Jew who narrowly survives the Holocaust by working for the
Gestapo as an interpreter. After the war, he converts to Catholicism,
becomes a priest, enters the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, and finally
emigrates to Israel. Despite this seemingly impossible progression, the
life and destiny of Daniel Stein are not an invention – the character is
based on the actual life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel.
This innovative, furious, and funny book, compiled as a series of
documents – letters, diary entries, postcards, and other records –
ranges from before the Second World War to modern times and from the
shtetl to Israel to America. It portrays a life full of amazing
contradictions and undaunted faith. In “Daniel Stein, Interpreter”,
Daniel’s willingness to communicate with everyone, to translate across
linguistic and cultural divides, not only assured his freedom but stands
as a symbol of love, humanity, and tolerance.
Donna Rifkind writes in The Christian Science Monitor
Again and again, through the unsentimental miscellany of this novel in
documents, Ulitskaya makes the improbable believable. Why would Daniel,
after suffering the horrors of this monstrous historical cataclysm, run
towards faith rather than away from it, and towards a faith that has
resonated with so much hostility in the minds of many Jews? How could
his modestly utopian quest to build a house of worship modelled on the
first Christian church in
Jerusalem attract any attention in modern Israel, ground zero
for every brand of religious extremism and Jerusalem-syndrome-afflicted
nutjobs? Yet through the slow unfolding of Ulitskaya's composite
storytelling, an entirely convincing portrait of Daniel emerges: we have
complete faith in his character, if not in his beliefs.
Ulitskaya writes in
the last of her novel’s confessional letters: “I recognise that what you
believe doesn't matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you
personally behave.”
From “Daniel Stein, Interpreter”
“I had been saving up what I had to tell him for so many years, and then
between the soup and the bigos I could not find how to begin. He himself
made it clear that he was prepared to listen to me. He said, ‘You know,
Daniel, it is very difficult to turn this great ship. There is a habit
of thinking in a particular manner, both about Jews and about many other
things. You have to change the direction without capsizing the ship.’
‘Your ship threw the Jews overboard, that’s the problem,’ I said. He was
sitting almost opposite me, slightly to one side. He has large hands and
the papal signet ring is large, and on his head was the white papal
skullcap, like a yarmulke, and he was listening attentively. Then I told
him everything I had been thinking these last years, the things which
keep me awake at night.” |
