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Arnošt Lustig (1926-2011) |
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Czech novelist and short story writer, who dealt in his work the horrors of World War II and especially the Holocaust. As a Jew, Arnošt Lustig was sent to the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Many of Lustig's works were based on his own experiences. His most famous books include the novellas Dita Saxová (1962) and Modlitba pro Katerinu Horovitzovou (1964, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova). Lustig's style is unsentimental and sketchily, the emphasis is on the moral choices of his characters. "Emil sometimes thought about the fact that even the most ordinary people play many roles in their lives. In his mind, he stood in front of a mirror: he saw himself as a breadwinner, businessman, and husband; friend, relative, brother-in-law, and uncle; and, at various other times in his life, son, student, soldier, and shop assistant. He was reminded of the way he'd sometimes slipped out of one role and then had to return to it later, and how at other times, certain roles merged and became, or were, mutually exclusive of one another. A man had to cue himself as to when to take on a role with the curtain up: to say "yes" in one role, "no" in another, and "maybe" in yet another. Sometimes he had to appear to play one role and talk as if he were playing a second, while in reality he was playing in a third." (The House of Returned Echoes by Arnošt Lustig, translated from the Czech by Josef Lustig, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 7; original title: Dům vrácené ozvěny, 1994) Arnošt
Lustig was born in Prague into a middle-class family,
the son of Emil and Terese (Lowy) Lustig. He attended a junior
technical school in Prague, but was denied the opportunity for further
education after the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. In 1942, at the age
of 16, he was sent with his family to the Theresienstadt "model ghetto"
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concentration camp, the setting of many of Lustig's stories. From there his family was transported to
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
where Lustig's father was immediately murdered at the end of September 1944 in the gas chamber
because he wore glasses. Lustig's book The
House of Returned Echoes was about his father. Against all odds, Lustig's mother and sister survived. They were first sent to an aircraft factory in Freiburg and then to Mathausen, which was liberated by the Allied forces at the close of the war. "I spend three years as a slave . . . It was a university about man that I couldn't have learned better." ('A Conversation with Arnošt Lustig' by Bob Trucks and Arnošt Lustig, New England Review, Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall, 1999, p. 68) In 1945 Lustig escaped certain death. He jumped from a transport train headed for Dachau, when the train was hit by an American bomber plane. After hiding in the countryside, Lustig went to Prague, where he joined the resistance movement and took part in the May Uprising against the Nazi occupation. After
the war Lustig found himself "exploding with the experiences which I
could never tell to anyone," because of disbelief at the thruth of the
Holocaust. ('Arnost Lustig (1926-)' by Joshua L. Charlson, in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work: Volume II, edited by S. Lillian Kremer, New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 779) He destroyed the manuscript of his first novel. Lusting studied at the College of Political and Social Sciences in Prague, receiving his M.A. in 1951. In 1949 he married Vera Weislotzova, whom he had met in Irael; they had one son and one daughter. From 1948 to 1956 Lusting worked as a radio correspondent for the Czechoslovak radio in Europe, Asia, and North America. In 1948-49 he covered the Arab-Israeli conflict. Lustig's novel Milácek (1969, Darling), a love story, was set during the war of 1948. Later, against the official line of the government, he was on the side of Israel in the Six-Day War. With his first collection of short stories, Noc a naděje
(1957), depicting life in a ghetto, Lustig emerged as a leading writer
of the Czech New Wave. It was followed by Démanty noci (1958,
Diamonds of the Night), which originally contained nine short stories, and was conceived as a sequel to Noc a naděje. Jan Němec's film Diamonds of the
Night was based on the story 'Tma nemá stín' (Darkness Casts No Shadow). He adapted it for the screen with Lustig; it was Němec's debut feature film. Darkness Casts No Shadows appeared in the same volume as Diamonds of the Night and was separately published in 1991 in an enlarged version. Němec's adaptation captures the ambiguosness of the novella; its conclusion has puzzled readers. The film follows two young Jewish men, Danny and Manny, who have escaped from a Nazi transport train. A woman, whom they ask food and drink, reports them, and they are caught at gun-point by Sudeten German home guards, elderly men. There are two endings: the escapees are shot, but an alternative ending shows them walking away into the woods. Dialogue is reduced to minimum. The cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera often used a high-key lighting to create a sort of dream realism. In contrast, scenes in the pine forest are oppressively dark. After Diamonds, Kučera photographed a film for Ivan Passer (A Boring Afternoon, 1964), and a series of films based on Bohumil Hrabal's short stories. A perfectionist, Lustig rewrote his early stories and regrouped some of his short stories into newly arranged collections. 'Muj známý Vili Feld' from The Steet of Lost Brothers was later expanded into a novel. A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova was based on an actual event in Auschwitz. A young Polish actress kills, as a last act of revolt, a German officer at the doors of a gas chamber, while others await their fate passively.
For a period in the late 1960s, Lusting worked the as a
reporter and producer and from 1960 he was employed as a scriptwriter
by the Barandov Film Studios, the craddle of the Czech New Wave in
film, where he collaborated on film adaptations of his works. Like many
intellectuals in his country, Lustig supported the economical and
social
reforms Alexander Dubcek, first secretary of Czechoslovakia's Communist
Party. He was also a close friend of the playwright Václav Havel,
a cofounder of the human rights organization Charter 77.
Lustig himself had been a member of the Communist Party since the end
of the war. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak
Writers' Union in 1967-1968. When the "Prague Spring" was crushed by the Soviet Invasion in 1968, Lustig was in Italy. His works were banned and he remained in exile. Feelings of spiritual and artistic death also drove away from the country writers such as Pavel Kohout, Milan Kundera, and Josef Škvorecký. Darling was the last of his books published in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring. Lustig spent a short time on Kibbutz Hachotrim in Israel and then he moved to Yugoslavia. There he worked for the Jadran Film Studio in Zagreb, and eventually settled in the United States in 1970. Nemilovaná: Z deníku sedmnáctileté Perly Sch. (1979) came out first in English translation. The story written in a form of a diary, was set in Terezin concentration camp, and told of a young Jewish woman, who is forced to prostitution. Like the female protagonist in Modlitba pro Katerinu Horovitzovou, she exercises freedom, when all hope is gone, in the act of choosing. In
his new home country Lustig joined the International
Writers Program at the University of Iowa. He served as a guest
lecturer at Nebraska State University and in 1973 he became a professor
of
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. Lustig also
lectured and taught at several other universities. In 1995 Lustig was
appointed editor in chief of the Czech-language version of Playboy magazine;
he hold the post for two years. After the fall of communism, Lustig divided his time between Washington, D.C. and Prague, but in 2003 he settled permanently in his his native city. Lustig played himself in 2000 in Amir Bar-Lev's documentary film Fighter, in which he recalled his own family's fate during WW II. When NATO held a summit in Prague in 2002, Lustig assisted President Havel in the visit of President George W. Bush and was assigned to entertain the U.S. First Lady. Lustig's numerous awards include the
Mlada fronta publishing house prize in 1962, Locarno Film Festival
Prize in 1963, the Monte Carlo Film Festival Prize in 1966, the
Czechoslovak Radio Corporation Prize in 1966 and 1967, Gottwald Prize
in 1967, the B'nai B'rith prize in 1974, the National Jewish Book award
in 1980 for Dita Saxova and in 1986 for The Unloved: From
the Diary of Perla S., the Emmy award in 1986 for documentary Precious
Legacy, and the Franz Kafka literary prize in 2008. He also shared
the 1991 Publishers Weekly Award for best literary work with
Norman Mailer and John Updike. Although Lustig wrote almost exclusively about the Jewish experience in Europe, he once said in an interview that he didn't consider himself a Holocaust writer. As Josef Škvorecký said, "he is remarkable because of the tragedy of a specific people becomes, in his fiction, the tragedy of man." ('Lustig, Arnost,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby, New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1995, p. 516) Arnošt Lustig died on February 26, 2011, in Prague. He had suffered from cancer for five years. Fore further reading; Arnošt Lustig by Aleš Haman (1995); 'Lustig, Arnost,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); 'A Conversation with Arnošt Lustig' by Rob Trucks and Arnošt Lustig, New England Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall, 1999); 'Lustig, Arnošt' by David Patterson, in Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, edited by David Patterson, Alan L. Berger, and Sarita Cargas (2002; 'Lustig, Arnošt' by Jeanie M. Tietjen, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Sorrel Kerbel (2003); 'Arnost Lustig (1926-)' by Joshua L. Charlson, in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work: Volume II, edited by S. Lillian Kremer (2003); 'Arnošt Lustig,' in A Handbook of Czech Prose Writing, 1940-2005 by Bohuslava Bradbrook (2007); Arnošt Lustig zadním vchodem by František Cinger (2009); The Holocaust Novel by Efraim Sicher (2013); Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought: Twentieth-century Central Europe and Movement to America by Bronislava Volková (2021) Selected works:
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