'Magic Forest' by Lutz Baar
Jean-Claude Grumberg's slender novella uses traditional fairy tale and modern meta-fiction to tell a tale that can't ever be entirely told or understood, but like all good fairy tales begins:
Once upon a time, in a great forest…
During one especially harsh, hungry winter during a World War, a woodcutter spends his days doing conscripted work for the invading army and evenings with his workmates drinking wood alcohol moonshine. Meanwhile his wife spends her days in the woodland gathering firewood and trying to provide for the two of them. She desperately wishes for a child and prays to 'the powers of heaven and earth' for one. As the years go by, she turns to praying for their hunger to end, for one day when she can eat her fill.
Then rail tracks are laid through the forest and one train goes through each day. The woodcutter tells her it's just a cargo train, but she imagines it filled with food and clothes and other good things, and makes sure she is there each day as it goes by hoping that the some of the train's wonderful cargo might be given to her.
She soon grew bolder and would go as close to the train as she dared, calling out, flailing her arms, pleading at the top of her voice, or if she was too far away to reach it in time, she would simply wave.
There are two parallel stories being told, one of the woodcutter and his wife along with the story of a French father who is a medical student, happily married, with infant twins. They are all put on a train to an unknown destination and when his wife no longer has enough milk for both children, the father picks up the baby closest to him as they lie next to his wife trying to nurse, wraps it in his prayer shawl which has gold and silver embroidery, and slips the bundle through the barred window into the snow as the train is slowed by drifts. There is much more story to come for the woodcutter's wife and the father, but I'll stop here.
The woodcutter's wife sees her world in a different way than others, it's filled with gods of the forest, the heavens, the train, and anything else around her. On the other hand, her husband sees the world they are actually living in too clearly and knows the dangers they are running, but he also gets swept away in the propaganda of those he's forced to work for.
A dark fairytale, 'a harrowing fable' as translator Frank Wynne describes it, is devastating and magical in turn, and it's also that most of unusual of creatures, a truly original Holocaust story. When the Epilogue is reached another voice joins in, a voice that asks what is more difficult to believe—the fairy tale just told or the treatment human beings mete out to other humans. It asks what the relationship is between myth and truth, why we have myths, and how the Holocaust is treated in such things as history and art, what is deemed permissible in the way it's talked about and what is not. The reader is left asking themselves questions about the current world and again about how humans treat other human beings as less than human. This is a searing and beautiful book I will not forget.
The young Jean-Claude Grumberg survived the Nazis because he was sheltered by several families in the town of Moissac. His blind grandfather, Naphtali Grumberg, was on Convoy 45 from Drancy in 1942, which carried 778 people, there were two survivors in 1945. Convoy 49 left in 1943 carrying 1,000 people including the author's father Zacharie, who like his father, did not survive.
Grumberg is a playwright, screenwriter, and author of children's books. Frank Wynne does his usual stellar job with the translation and the book includes his endnote on it.
(The Most Precious of Cargoes was translated from French by Frank Wynne and published in 2020.)
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