It is New Year's Eve 1945 in a small Soviet town not long liberated from German occupation. Sashenka, a headstrong and self-centered teenage girl, resents her mother for taking a lover after her father's death in the war, and denounces her to the authorities for the petty theft that keeps them from going hungry. When she meets a Jewish lieutenant who has returned to bury his family, betrayed and murdered by their neighbors during the occupation, both must come to terms with the trauma that surrounds them as their relationship deepens.
Redemption is a stark and powerful portrait of humanity caught up in Stalin's police state in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust. In this short novel, written in 1967 but unpublished for many years, Friedrich Gorenstein effortlessly combines the concrete details of daily life in this devastated society with witness testimonies to the mass murder of Jews. He gives a realistic account of postwar Soviet suffering through nuanced psychological portraits of people confronted with harsh choices and a coming-of-age story underscored by the deep involvement of sexuality and violence. Interspersed are flights of philosophical consideration of the relationship between Christians and Jews, love and suffering, justice and forgiveness. A major addition to the canon of literature bearing witness to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Redemption is an important reckoning with anti-Semitism and Stalinist repression from a significant Soviet Jewish voice.
It is New Year's Eve 1945 in a small Soviet town not long liberated from German occupation. Sashenka, a headstrong and self-centered teenage girl, resents her mother for taking a lover after her father's death in the war, and denounces her to the authorities for the petty theft that keeps them from going hungry. When she meets a Jewish lieutenant who has returned to bury his family, betrayed and murdered by their neighbors during the occupation, both must come to terms with the trauma that surrounds them as their relationship deepens.
Redemption is a stark and powerful portrait of humanity caught up in Stalin's police state in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust. In this short novel, written in 1967 but unpublished for many years, Friedrich Gorenstein effortlessly combines the concrete details of daily life in this devastated society with witness testimonies to the mass murder of Jews. He gives a realistic account of postwar Soviet suffering through nuanced psychological portraits of people confronted with harsh choices and a coming-of-age story underscored by the deep involvement of sexuality and violence. Interspersed are flights of philosophical consideration of the relationship between Christians and Jews, love and suffering, justice and forgiveness. A major addition to the canon of literature bearing witness to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Redemption is an important reckoning with anti-Semitism and Stalinist repression from a significant Soviet Jewish voice.
Introduction by Emil Draitser
Redemption
Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002), born in Kiev, was a Soviet Jewish
writer and screenwriter who collaborated with Andrei Tarkovsky on
Solaris (1972), among other works. His father was arrested during
Stalin’s purges and later shot. Unable to publish in the Soviet
Union, Gorenstein emigrated to Berlin, where he lived until his
death. An award-winning film adaptation of Redemption was released
in 2012.
Andrew Bromfield is an acclaimed translator of contemporary Russian
writers such as Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin. He has also
translated Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Redemption is awash with brutal truths, rude awakenings and painful
self-discoveries. Gorenstein doesn't make it easy for his reader:
His forbidding theme is the aftermath of the Holocaust — the
aftershock of 'ineluctable, planned murder' — and his protagonist
is an unsympathetic young woman. But the darkness is not total;
there are numerous glints of light, even pockets of beauty.
Gorenstein skillfully crafts scenes, paints landscapes and conveys
moods. We move from the shabby elegance of the ball to the snowy
streets with their burned-out ruins. We watch with morbid
fascination as Sashenka inflicts damage on others and then herself.
Punctuating her many trials and errors are searching meditations on
suffering and salvation, love and fate.
*Star Tribune*
Set immediately after World War II in a Soviet town emerging from
German occupation, Friedrich Gorenstein’s Redemption is a small
masterpiece of post-Holocaust fiction. Vividly translated by Andrew
Bromfield, this is a gripping book—full of searing psychological
portraits threaded across intersecting social, political, and
historical microcosms. Redemption startles the reader with its
emotionally and philosophically vivid account of sex and violence
and the strange horizons of love.
*Val Vinokur, The New School*
Bromfield’s translation of Gorenstein’s Redemption peels away the
layers of the still underexamined archive of the Holocaust in the
USSR. In the immediate aftermath of the war with Nazi Germany,
denizens of a town in Soviet Ukraine begin to face the consequences
of the wartime treatment of their Jewish neighbors. Official
documents and witness reports crowd in on personal recollections of
perpetrators, survivors, and their progeny in a narrative that
shifts between stylistic registers as it challenges the contours of
collective memory and individual responsibility. I’m thrilled that
this work by an important Russian author is now available to the
English-language reader.
*Sasha Senderovich, University of Washington, Seattle*
A master of episodic narration. . . . Gorenstein also proves to be
a keen observer and radically critical chronicler of Soviet
society.
*Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*
Told honestly but philosophically, this is the story of two young
people’s love in the aftermath of World War II, as some traumas
were healing and others were only beginning, laying bare the
underacknowledged Holocaust in the USSR.
*World Literature Today*
The cast of Redemption is destitute, traumatized, and beset by a
restless police apparatus hunting out wartime collaborators. They
are constitutionally unfit to bring new life into the world — yet
they do: securing food and heat, having parties, making babies, and
burying the dead. All of it, the book argues, is the result of
ineluctable forces — biological, tectonic, geothermal — rather than
proof of any spiritual or ideological purpose. The countless
victims of the war have not been redeemed by the living; their
murders won’t be paid back. Indeed, the novel’s beauty and its
truth rest on the knowledge that redemption is inconceivable and
that life persists in its absence.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Friedrich Gorenstein (1932-2002) is a major figure in the history
of 20th-century Russian literature—and a most curious one. On the
one hand, his novels blend fiction with religion, philosophy, and
politics in a way that is quintessentially Russian, reminiscent of
writers from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Chekhov and, in the 20th
century, Andrei Platonov. On the other hand, throughout his
voluminous body of work, he defiantly tackles those selfsame issues
as a Jewish writer, a Jewish thinker, and an uncompromising Jewish
voice. . . . The power of Gorenstein’s writing lies in the fact
that his weighty, nuanced, and idiosyncratic political and
religious imagination is channeled through a spellbinding lyrical
style.
*Mosaic*
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