![Umschlagbild für The Train to Warsaw [electronic resource] : A Novel](https://images.yourcloudlibrary.com/delivery/img?type=DOCUMENTIMAGE&documentID=ev646r9&token=nobody "Umschlagbild für The Train to Warsaw [electronic resource] : A Novel")
Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
Two Holocaust survivors, now married, return to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto they fled forty years ago in this "riveting, dream-like" novel ( The New York Times Book Review ).
In 1942, Jascha and Lilka separately fled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Reunited years later, they now live in London where Jascha has become a celebrated writer, feted for his dark tales about his wartime adventures. Forty years after the war, Jascha receives a letter inviting him to give a reading in Warsaw. He tells Lilka that nothing remains of the city they knew and that wild horses couldn't drag him back.
Lilka, however, is nostalgic for the city of her childhood and manages to change Jascha's mind. Together, traveling by train through a frozen December landscape, they return to the city of their youth. When they unwittingly find themselves back in what was once the ghetto, they will discover that they still have secrets between them as well as an inescapable past.
"With quiet but devastating force, Edelman plays the experience of being closed in--to trauma, to the past, to a ghetto--against the experience of being forever cast out." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A compelling tale told by two lovers, whose stunning, sometimes shocking dialogue ultimately becomes an exploration of the enduring wounds of the Holocaust, the mystery of memory, and the irresolvable traumas of lived experience." -- Haaretz (Israel)
"A powerful and moving novel that is both disturbing and exhilarating." -- Washington Independent Review of Books
"A well-crafted study of exile and return." -- Publishers Weekly
Rezensionen (4)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Edelman's second novel (after War Story) is a tale of the Holocaust's lingering wounds, told in polished prose of distilled intensity. After fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto, Jascha, a Polish Jew, settles in London and finds success with a critically lauded memoir, The Way Down. Yet his wife, Lilka, another Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland, never feels at home: "Even after forty years, London is as alien to me as the other side of the moon." When they are invited back to Warsaw for Jascha to give a reading, Lilka considers their return a homecoming, while Jascha does not, saying "God knows why we are going... didn't we have enough?" Jascha and Lilka must confront the melancholy alienness of their onetime home, where they find themselves lost in once-familiar streets, and Lilka is made to feel like an outsider by residents who compliment her on her excellent Polish. At the reading, Jascha focuses on his work's most challenging moments, prompting walkouts from an audience whose members are still unable to reckon with their past. Afterward, the couple continues to re-explore the city, all the while working backward into their separate histories, until their stories meet, and they learn that some old truths still have the power to shock, even after 40 years. Edelman has written a well-crafted study of exile and return whose depth exceeds its length. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist-Rezension
Edelman's first novel, War Story (2001), made a splash. The title of this postwar tale refers to the trains that left the Warsaw ghetto for the camps. Jascha Kroll, ne Krasniewski, and his wife, Lilka, return to Warsaw, a city they never expected to see again, happy as they were to escape it. Kroll, famous for his novel about the ghetto, has been invited to give a reading. On the long ride there and during two long nights in Warsaw, Jascha and Lilka remember and relive their harrowing internment and narrow escape. Jascha was a swaggering smuggler, Lilka a nurse. Their visit prompts revelations. The past is still present, pressing relentlessly on their sense of themselves as Jews, as Poles, as Polish Jews and on their life together as the love of each other's lives. Can it be, he asked, that you've forgotten what fear is?, is a rhetorical query. The most compelling part of this war story is how Jascha and Lilka inhabit such different answers to that crucial question.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
IN SEPTEMBER 1939, more than 350,000 Jews lived in Warsaw. Six years later, only 11,500 were left. Most of Warsaw itself had been wiped from the face of the earth. But not from memory, especially for those who were young at that heightened moment, when the colors of the world tend to be their most saturated and intense. The irretrievability of youth and the desire to return to the past bedevil us all, but what happens when that lost Eden is intricately tied to staggering loss? What is the particular anguish of longing for a time just before, or even during, atrocity? These are some of the questions that drive Gwen Edelman's riveting, dream-like second novel, "The Train to Warsaw," which is compressed into a two-day period and centers on Lilka and Jascha, two survivors of the Warsaw ghetto. The novel opens with the couple en route from London to Poland, their first time back in the 40 years since they left. Jascha, now a famous writer in his 60s, has been invited to give a reading at the Writers' House in Warsaw, but it is Lilka, consumed with the vision of walking once again through the "Saxony Gardens," of eating "cabbage and pierogi, latkes and goose liver," who has insisted on this trip. They sit together in the freezing train compartment, smoking cigarettes, eating the chocolates she keeps in her purse and disagreeing about the snow-covered landscape speeding by outside the window, which for him holds "nothing human in it" but for her is beautiful, "the whole world white and unbroken." Theirs is an erotically charged relationship, composed in equal parts of exasperation, grief and unyielding love. They first met in the early days of the Warsaw ghetto, when Lilka was a 16-year-old nurse-in-training from an upper-middle-class Jewish family and Jascha one of the ghetto's top smugglers. Both seem partly frozen in their youthful poses, she still very much the wishful girl, an "angel" in the "midst of all that filth," and he the cold-eyed realist who can't help challenging her reflexive softening of the truth. "You were a man of the world," she tells him now. "Of a small enclosed world," he responds, "where everyone was about to die." Edelman, whose previous novel, "War Story," also dealt with reverberations of the Holocaust, brings us exhilaratingly close to the interior experiences of this couple, who are walled in by what has happened to them. She uses the spaces they occupy in the novel - a train compartment, a hotel room, a steamy bathroom - to underline their enclosed world. She also forgoes quotation marks, indentations and line breaks with dialogue, allowing the words and memories of her characters to roll into one another like a kind of psychic enjambment: "He put out a hand to her. That's enough for now, darling. No, she said fiercely and pushed his hand away. Don't give me your hand. He shook his head. Why are we fighting? It was so long ago. Lilka spread a roll with black jam. Not to me, she said. It's as near to me as last week." Lilka's yearning for her childhood home, and her haunted sense of a shadow universe of long-gone people and places existing right beside her, gather urgency in the novel's final third when the couple, who have stayed inside their hotel room all day, finally set forth into the snow-shrouded streets of Warsaw. The exposure is, of course, brutal. Neither has fully anticipated how naked they would feel wandering these streets - or what, after 40 years, they would finally reveal to each other. They are, we realize, a kind of Adam and Eve, and it is no coincidence that late at night, in the cold, they find themselves in a frozen garden. With quiet but devastating force, Edelman plays the experience of being closed in - to trauma, to the past, to a ghetto - against the experience of being forever cast out. The couple haven't anticipated how naked they would feel wandering these cold streets. SARAH TOWERS'S short fiction has been published in Tin House, Elle and The Chariton Review.
Library Journal-Rezension
The winner of the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger for War Story, Edelman takes a distinctive approach to the Holocaust novel, presenting a husband and wife who return to Poland four decades after their escape from the Warsaw Ghetto. They travel by train through a spare, hushed landscape laden with snow, and the spare, hushed narrative is immediately striking, though eventually it might make some readers feel distanced. Jascha and Lilka were lovers in the ghetto, where Jascha made a name for himself as a daring smuggler, but they fled separately and reunited in London. Now a celebrated writer, Jascha has been invited to give a reading in his native city, and though he declares, "I want to return to Warsaw like I want the cholera," Lilka persuades him to go. Both during their travels and once they arrive, the two exchange memories of what they endured, almost as if they were storytellers, and these unadorned passages have a quiet immediacy. VERDICT The tenderness of the couple toward each other contrasts with the brutality of the backstory, which is heightened by a winter chill that readers will feel. A thoughtful work that will especially satisfy those interested in the era depicted.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
