Street of Lost Brothers

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The seven stories in Street of Lost Brothers reverberate with the haunting theme of duality/duplicity that has become the great signature of Arnošt Lustig’s fiction. They draw us into a world of loss and contradiction, of people tormented by the uncertainty that comes from never being quite sure where one has been, or is now, or may be going. It is a world made insubstantial by the Nazi terror, in which words have lost their meaning, truth has become lie, justice cruelty—and where every heroic action is offset by its echo in mundane and terrible reality.

The questions Lustig explores were not born of the Holocaust; they are as old and as universal as mankind’s search for the meaning of existence. The fact that he has chosen that most real and unreal of times as a vehicle is not surprising. What is remarkable is the way in which he is able to enter the minds of his Nazi characters, understanding their emotional and moral frailties as few others have been capable; the reader is at once repelled and fascinated.

An astounding symbol occurs in “Clock Like a Windmill” which helps interpret much of Lustig’s fictional world. Two enormous clocks arranged on the tower of what was once Prague’s Jewish Town Hall mark the time: one in the ordinary way, the other backward using Hebrew letters instead of numbers. One clock is the reverse of the other; time appears to go forward and backward simultaneously. And yet the end comes with unalterable finality to those trapped in the Town Hall’s cellar, even as they imagine themselves at the threshold of freedom and a new life.

In “A Man the Size of a Postage Stamp,” a German commandant and the simpleminded son he cannot love “relocate” a group of Jewish children and their devoted teacher in a windowless “ambulance” that is in fact a mobile gas chamber. Lustig’s juxtaposition of true parent with false, of people who love each other with people who only pretend to do so, makes this one of his most powerful and evocative stories. This extraordinary collection confirms once again Lustig’s place as one of the foremost writers of postwar Europe.