Night and Hope

Arnost Lustig

jun 2017 · Pickle Partners Publishing

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First published in 1962, Night and Hope is a collection of interrelated short stories by a young Czech writer who was a boy in the Terezín concentration camp near Prague during the war. They have already been received with great acclaim abroad and they now make their appearance for the first time in this country. They reveal what it was like to live in a sealed town which was in fact a reception station for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. A guard thrashes a poor old woman on the counter of her little shop and each are curiously resigned to their roles of giving and receiving degradation. Little boys play in the streets and are quietly regretful that they won’t grow up and wear fine clothes. A guard’s wife and her coffee-party friends stroll round the ghetto to collect anything that catches their eye—a wedding-ring, pathetic clothes....

Arnošt Lustig’s stories are a new and vivid focus on this fearful tragedy as it affected the private individual. They are written with restraint yet nothing is glossed, and they take their place amongst the very best writing to have come out of the shambles of Hitler’s ‘Jewish Question’.

“Arnošt Lustig has succeeded in putting truth into a poem. Nothing in art could mean more than that. His style is sober and modern, his sentence carries all attributes of that which connects prose with poetry and makes it obvious how slight and unperceivable the borderlines between genres.”—L. Askenazy, Literarni Noviny (Prague).

“Each tale has a genuine unity of its own and is a small work of art in its own right. No one reading them could ever feel that they were only stories.”—The Times Literary Supplement (London).

“No writer in Europe, in the East or in the West, has expressed as much truth about the time of the holocaust as Arnošt Lustig.”—Maariv (Tel Aviv).

“Outstanding stories.”—The Bookman, London

Acerca del autor

ARNOŠT LUSTIG (21 December 1926 - 26 February 2011) was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust.

He was born in Prague and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942, and later Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In 1945 he escaped from a train carrying him to the Dachau concentration camp when the engine was destroyed by an American fighter-bomber. He returned to Prague in time to take part in the May 1945 anti-Nazi uprising.

After the war, he studied journalism at Charles University in Prague and worked for Radio Prague. He then worked as a journalist in Israel at the time of its War of Independence and met his wife, Věra Weislitzová, a former Terezín concentration camp survivor.

Following the Soviet-led invasion that ended the Prague Spring in 1968, he moved to Yugoslavia, then Israel, and later in 1970 to the United States. He spent the academic year 1970-1971 as a scholar in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After the fall of eastern European communism in 1989, he divided his time between Prague and Washington, D.C., where he continued to teach at the American University.

After his retirement in 2003, he became a full-time resident of Prague. In 2008, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Karel Čapek Prize in 1996. He died in Prague in 2011 aged 84.