Eine Seele aus Holz

by Jakov Lind

Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood brought its author immediate fame when it was published in Germany in 1962, earning him a reputation as one of the most boldly imaginative postwar German writers. In the title novella and six stories here, Lind deals masterfully with a world of horror through fantasy, paradox, and sardonic distortion and brings to life the agonies of twentieth-century Europe.In “Soul of Wood,” Anton Barth, a paralyzed young Jew, is smuggled to safety as his parents are shipped off to their deaths. Then, however, we discover that Barth’s purported protector, the wooden-legged war invalid Wohlbrecht–who is the deeply unreliable, self-pitying, half-mad narrator of the story–has simply abandoned the helpless boy in a forest cabin. Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna, where he is soon busy assisting a psychiatrist in administering lethal injections to his patients. But as Germany collapses before the Russian offensive, Wohlbrecht rushes back to the woods in the frenzied hope that he will somehow be able to reclaim “his” Jew, and so preserve himself from retribution. Horrifying and humorous by turns, Lind’s stories alternate scenes of pure savagery and madcap hilarity, displaying a grim inventiveness unmatched in modern literature.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, War, German Literature, 20th Century, Germany, Historical Fiction

205 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Leonard promised. To escape from hell he promised everything.’

We are all endowed with a survival instinct whose gears whir up at the borderlines of life and death and bestow blinders on our rationality to keep the goal of survival-at-all-costs the only clear victory. Jakov Lind’s superb short story collection Soul of Wood examines morality through it’s ugly and sinister negation, delivering seven sadistic and deeply allegorical stories following those who trade morality to prolong their mortality. These are unflinching stories bearing shadows of the holocaust and the only comfort therein is the dark humor that keeps you laughing through the onslaught of degradation, a laughter that sounds strangely like the creaking and cracking of a soul in a storm. With a biting wit=and wild prose that exemplifies the untamed and savage human heart, Lind’s vivid imaginative vision has the reader running like cockroaches into the dark recesses of humanity to survive in an untamed realm where the sunshine of morality can’t be counted on to light the way.

Jakov Lind has a style all of his own that makes Soul of Wood all the more haunting and surreal. He trains his eye on the darkness of reality, yet adds fleeting textures of magical-realism that gives the journey a feel like being in the deep, dark woods of fairy-tales; is it purely the horrors of imagination lurking in the shadows or is there something inexplicable afoot summoned from hell by the evils of Man. Populated by a cast of characters ranging through Nazis, priest, cannibals and convicted killers, and powered by allegorical moral undercurrents, Lind has created what almost feels like a Grimm’s collection of the World War II era. His writing style is also reflective of the human wilderness, keeping his prose sly and dodgy like a man on the run. His dialogue is particularly interesting, containing multiple character's speech and interior monologues within the larger paragraph of ideas without use of quotation marks as guide-posts to separate them. It is slightly stylistically different yet thematically similar to the way José Saramago uses dialogue to tie characters to the natural world and emphasize the discombobulation of reality. A perfect example of Lind’s flair can be seen here, a paragraph concerning a man convincing a taxi driver to take him and his large crate which secretly contains a young jewish boy whom he is charged with hiding:

What you got in the crate? shouted the driver into the mirror. Wohlbrecht’s first impulse was to tell him to go to hell, but foresight is better that hindsight. If I say dishes, Wohlbrecht reflected, he’s the kind to get suspicious...it’s the innocent things that make people suspicious. My mother-in-law cut up in little pieces! The driver grinned. That old cripple is O.K. He decided to come down to twenty-five marks. You killed her first, I hope? You think I’m crazy? Wohlbrecht called back. Too much like work. I did it the other way. The driver laughed till his teeth almost fell out of his mouth. I can’t ask him for more than twenty. What a character. Live and let live, that was the driver’s motto…

Lind contains everything into one block of an idea, forcing the reader to swallow a heightened emotional punch rather than sustaining it across line breaks. It also reveals Lind’s ability to deftly sashay between perspectives, threading in and out of multiple characters points-of-view in order to pull everything together in an impressive manner. His ability to present all perspectives—from character’s to the authorial—without denoting them as such with punctuation removes all boundaries and makes his stories not about one person but all people and the world around them.

‘See, he shouted, you’ve made an ass of yourself for life. Look who wants to live.’

World War II brought horrors all across Europe, affecting all and leaving the scars of survival in the hearts and souls of those who made it through to the other side. The title-novella, a near perfect story that makes the book worth reading alone, satirizes the will to live for those caught in the wars clutches. Crippled veteran Wolbrecht finds any method to survive wherever he can, even working as a double agent between two rival doctors at the insane asylum in which he is placed. The two Nazi doctors spend the war putting inmates to death to meet their high daily quota of injections, and plotting ways to find themselves holding the syringe against the arm of the other. As the war is drawing to a close, they set aside their differences and team up to find the Jewish boy Wolbrecht hid in the mountains years before in hopes that protecting one will save them from execution after the inevitable war trials. Survival, it seems, comes before any sense of right and wrong. They are willing to betray their fellow man when doing so keeps them in good favor, washing their hands of murder in the name of duty, and their act of saving someone is not an expression of goodwill but simple survival. They are even willing to kill in order to save. In the story Ressurection, two men live like rats in a tiny space within a wall to escape the Nazis, showing the amazing feats a human is capable of in order to survive.

Lind asks us what use is survival, what good is life? in a world where such unspeakable horrors can be held as commonplace.

What have you got to look forward to in Paris? Paris is only a city. Whom do you need anyway, and who needs you? You’re going to Paris. Well, what of it? Sex and drinking won’t make you any happier. And certainly working won’t. Money won’t do you a particle of good. What are you getting out of life?

The will to survive keeps the reader empathizing with many of the characters, but Lind frequently reminds us that they are choosing to survive in a world that he continually paints as a disgusting, disturbing and depressing place, a world where the government decides who is suitable for life: ‘those who had no papers entitling them to live lined up to die.’ Cannibalism is a common theme in several stories, used as a metaphor of human interaction: the strong kill and eat the weak to survive.

If you don’t do that which disgusts you,’ says the cannibal in Journey Through the Night, ’what becomes of your disgust? It sticks in your throat. Nothing sticks in the throat of the man from Sankt Polten. He swallows all.

In Hurrah for Freedom we see a nudist family of cannibals (you read that correctly) that eats their children and has a dead horse hung from the rafters, insisting that once it has rotted to a skeleton that their home country of Lithuania will be free. They are prideful of their ways, a lifestyle depicted as most revolting, simply because their lifestyle means they do not have to live under Russian occupation.

Religion figures prominently into many of these stories, and often in unique and surprising ways. There are many theological discussions between characters that are revealing into their hearts. In The Pious Brother, a darkly humorous story featuring an attractive young actress who can only achieve sexual gratification by seducing priests, an aging German Princess expresses her disgust at the common depictions of Jesus.

I want to know why our Savior is always represented as a soft, gently, I might almost say effeminate man. A man who could chase the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip, who had the physical strength to carry His own cross up a mountain, cannot possibly have looked like that. I refuse to think of him as a weakling.

The Princess disgusts the priest as she takes pride in having sent all her sons off to die as members of the S.S. It is no surprise then that she would only love a Jesus depicted as strong and mighty, a Jesus that could properly represent the Third Reich. Her sort of God is found later in stories like The Window, where God walks among man as a gangster of sorts, employing terrorists and offering miracles in order to take men’s souls under threat of a knife-blade.

Highly original and darkly allegorical, Jakov Lind’s stories are an absolute delight. The themes are similar to those found in his intensely amazing Landscape in Concrete, yet the multiple stories allow Lind to assess the ideas for a wider ranging array of perspectives. The title-novella is one of the best stories I have read in a long time and has a startling and stunning conclusion that won’t soon be forgotten. This collection is powerful and disturbing, yet sooths with a humor that makes you laugh aloud, yet then wonder about your own morality if such notions can be regarded as funny. This is a perfect collection and one best suited for those who wish to stare into the abyss, for when the abyss stares back all you can do is laugh and laugh and laugh.
5/5

‘I’ve got to eat you. In the first place I’m hungry, and in the second place I like you. I told you right off that I like you and you thought, the guy is queer. But now you know. I’m a simple cannibal. It’s not a profession, it’s a need.’

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most potent writing I've read in a long while. Lind is really unique and powerful. His language (in translation of course) is clear and fairly simple but vibrant and never anything less than incisive and essential. There is a very powerful mind at work here. At times he reminds me of Bruno Schulz in that both seamlessly transition into fantastic movements with graceful ease. But it's only in the language itself that you'll find much beauty in Lind. He's not a horror writer but he's horrifying in the same way that Wisconsin Death Trip seeps into your conscious and slowly unravels your sense of sanity with stunning efficacy. What is it about those that matured in the 50s that produced the likes of Gein, Fish and Lind? All three were acutely interested in the limits of human cruelty and thankfully Lind left his interests to his imagination. Soul of Wood is a book that impacts your senses so acutely you swear you smell his words. The magic in Lind is in the way that exterior reality transmogrifies into dream-like hallucinatory horror. Nudist families eat children and measure time in the ossification of horses instead of clocks. Murderers chat you up about how you'll taste and coax you to let them pre-salt your flesh. A very personal understanding of religion results in suicide as a means to insult as god is redefined throughout these collected stories. Those that have experienced hallucination know that lack of previously understood reality isn't mere obfuscation but a heightening of the senses that creates an alternate reality. Lind feels each breath, each step with this type of heightened clarity that boils over into the fantastic. If you're familiar with Caroliner, Lind should be familiar in theme to you. Organic decay results in the ergot spores that when ingested seem to infect the rural hallucination that informs Lind as well. Intuitive and visceral - Lind's book charges right at your senses and shakes you powerfully. This is definitely one of the most interesting and powerful short story writers I know. This is not for the faint of heart and I imagine more than one reader collapsed in retreat faced with some of Lind's ideas. If you know what men like Albert Fish and Ed Gein did to other humans - you'll be better braced for reading Lind. Disease, war, TB and human sexuality are rendered with Caroliner's day glow funhouse palette to great effect. This is a quick but far from easy read that will thrill you if it doesn't please you at least. No odder than Gilgamesh or Gargantua and no less horrifying than Panzram or Fish - Soul of Wood will leave you a changed reader.

If you're interested in hearing Caroliner - avoid Youtube and BUY a record - sit with the awesome lyric sheet and be prepared to forget your previous opinions about music. Start with Cooking Stove Beast or Rise of The Common Woodpile - or maybe Banknotes Dreams Signatures. If you're too stubbornly opposed to that - at least Youtube non-live tracks and scope out the lyric sheets here: http://www.doomsdaycreativeenterprise... - start with the early stuff. I'm off to find more Lind.

[Ben Winch]

Another book I read months back and am only now coming to reflect on, consequently I can’t say much in detail. One thing though: it didn’t enthrall me. It was good, and true, and truly its author’s own, but it seemed such a random flight of fancy at times that I almost let it go, let it glide away weightless to realms where I didn’t care to follow. Or no: weightless? Clearly not. A wartime tale about a paralysed Jewish kid minded by an ex-army cripple with a persecution complex? There’s weight here, plenty of it. But the mystical stuff on the mountain with the kid while his erstwhile protector struggled through endemic corruption back in the city trying to fence his booty – all that seemed such a left-turn it might almost be another story. I didn’t wanna follow the cripple, I guess; I wanted to stay with the kid, and for the kid not to be a fairy story. But what the hell: it could just be me. The prose was good: sparse, brutal; it cut to the chase. But the whole thing left me mystified more than moved. Could be I’ll give it another try, but on the basis of this novella and a couple of dark-as-pitch short stories I’m guessing that, for now at least, Lind isn’t quite my style.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each story here is a careening, delirious, madcap tour through the rattled soul of mid 20th century Europe. The collection’s greatest achievement is the titular novella in which a disabled veteran fights for survival in the absurdist inferno of Austria under the Third Reich where, finally, a handful of megalomaniacs compete to take possession of a sort of miraculous young Jew.

[Annelies · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title story is the most important in this book. It's a story that learns us how people can change their opinions and behaviour concerning the party they belong too. One does everything to survive; even betrayal has a part in it.

It's a story about how the insane where treated during WO II; the special treatment they get which meams a lethal injection and how doctors where forced to get their daily quotum. It shows us how small the line between good and bad is.

The central theme in whole the book was death in all its unimagibale forms. Most of the stories where dark in character and left bad and uneasy feelings.

I prefered the main story, the title story. If the rating was for that story alone, I think I would have rated it 4 stars. Now it's a 3 star rating because I thought the other stories much less complex and inferior.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

One novella, from which the title is taken, and a grouping of stories, the last of which, "Resurrection," is quite superb, about the friendship that develops between a young Jewish man and a middle-aged Jewish Christian who are both in hiding from the Nazis. There is an almost magic realism feel to much of what is here, a dark humor, a strong sense of the macabre.

[Sarah Rendon]

honestly i only finished this because i had no internet and no other books lol i did not love

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Soul of Wood is excellent and the remaining pieces are ok to pretty good. thank you strand bookstore for this cool surprise even though you did not have anything else i was looking for

Only to tell you the truth, I really do have a rotting corpse in the woods. But between you and me, Professor, Wohlbrecht leaned over the table and whispered, I just say hocus-pocus and the corpse comes to life. I say a quick double hocus-pocus and he stands up and shakes my hand. If I want to make him dead again, I do it with a simple wave of the hand. Like this. And he's dead again. I'm not a magician, but I know a few tricks. But that's just between you and me.


I carried him up on my back, he'll come back down on my back, I'll put his skull under my shirt, it won't fall out, I'll tie the bones together and put them inside the ribs. I won't carry him in my hands, 'cause if I slip something might break. I don't want a single bone to be missing.
Why not? the Devil asked.
Because he belongs to me. Every bit of him. Twenty -three years are half a lifetime. I've got nothing to give away. That's a fact, said the Devil and flew (buzz, buzz like a cockchafer) away.


What did it say in his diary for July 17th, 1943? 'Slept with fourteen Ukranian girls and women. Cost: fourteen slices of bread. Price of bread, thirty pfennings - apparently two pfennings per coitus. War is war.'

God is love, breasts are mostly milk-glands.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will openly admit that this book took me a HOT MINUTE to finish, despite it being quite short. I’m not sure whether magical-realism/absurdism just isn’t my genre or perhaps a lot of the allegorical moments went over my head, but this book felt like it dragged pretty heavily (and made little sense) at times—though this entirely varied per short story. The title piece was long but enjoyable; The Pious Brother was also good (love a good Fleabag-esque scandal).

All of that being said, the book still earns a solid 3 stars from me, as I was there when it was found in a secondhand bookstore and subsequently purchased by someone very dear to me. 3 stars for good mems and a neat cover image!

[Elisa Van Maaren · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3,5. Absoluut absurd. Absoluut naar. Nog steeds jammer dat de omslag niet op Goodreads staat

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, and well written, with a very bleak view of human nature - though not as soul-crushingly bleak as I was expecting from reading the back cover blurbs - the clear winner:
"Nihilistic, metallic, absurd. . . . Intricate, black, bestial. . . .” —Robert Mazzocco

The title story's actually more of a dark farce. The plot is appropriately cynical - after promising to continue to care for a jewish family's paralyzed son (in exchange for an apartment) as the mother and father are sent off to a concentration camp, the horrible protagonist of the story abandons the boy to a cabin in the woods. Once the war is over he and others (all Nazi collaborators in some way) realize the value of appearing to have hidden and cared for the boy (surely dead at this point) and make a mad dash to claim the body. I enjoyed the pitch black humor and the out of nowhere absurd magical elements - like when the poor abandoned paraplegic boy gets transformed into sort of green/wild-man of the forest by the magical headbutt of a stag. Admittedly, there are a few short stories left that I haven't gotten to, but the others I've read beyond the main title story are also pretty good. My favorite so far is a fantastic and scary short story about a man who's trapped on a train with a very matter-of-fact serial killer and faced with some tough choices. Still, the dark and cynical tone of the stories isn't really what I'm looking for right now, so back to the shelf go the remaining few for another time.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

The son of Viennese Jews, Lind was moved to Holland in 1938 at the age of 11 and spent his war years both there and in Germany "passing" for a Gentile Dutchman.
This somewhat arbitrary way of having been spared seems to have shaped his literary sensibility which is imbued with absurdism and black humor.
Each story concerns someone in disguise (which mostly fools no one, as in the case of Jewish convert to Christianity, hidden in an Amsterdam hollow wall, expounding his new faith with Talmudic intensity and discursion), in hiding both literally and figuratively (a boy paralyzed since birth who is suddenly able to walk when abandoned in the woods at age 20 and by the end of the war has decided he is actually a deer), or, in two stories, confronting cannibalism in some odd form.
Lind gets compared to Musil, Joseph Roth and other Viennese writers of the turn of the 20th century - the dialog of working class characters also reminds me of Alfred Döblin.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good collection, but it didn't quite live up to the promise of the title novella, which is one of the most bizarre and entertaining things I've read in recent memory. Lind's ability to move between (and not so much mix) realism, fabulist allegory and outright surrealism is pretty amazing, and surprisingly not jarring. He's got the ingredients here for an all-time favorite (Nazi mental hospitals, witches, horse cadavers hanging from the rafters and more), but most of the short stories seemed like they were symbolic of something that went right over my head. And/or just too surreal, in some cases. At any rate, I had always suspected that there must have been a writer who could and would apply some brutal Central European black humor to the ultimate non-humorous subject of the Holocaust. Here he is. I will be reading more of him.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a strange trip this was! Got this because it is war fiction. It is set during WWII or just after. The title is a novela and the rest (4-5?) of the stories are all short and strange. Flying acolytes, naked human Barbie dolls, SS officers-become-priests, so strange.

But the writing...oh so good.

I bought this in the wonderful Yellow Dog bookshop in Columbia, MO, for $6.50, making my 2019 book budget so far $128.70 for the year.

[Ben Oreper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally idiosyncratic voice rendering phantasmagorical pastiche. Lind’s a true original and his batshit bio lends some additional dimension to a few of these stories. I found an odd sense of comfort in the way he imbibed his personages of evil with an absurdity that rings true. Somewhere on the spectrum between magical realism, gonzo journalism and Kafka.

“Mr. Leander threw back his head, indicating the men. Every night it’s like this. They can’t agree.
What do they want? asked Brasil.
Anarchists, Leander whispered. They want to blow something up. At my request. Probably a church. How do I know?
Anyway I’ve notified the police. They’re being watched. But as long as they can’t come to an agreement, nothing happens. Anarchists, bad lot. Useful at times.”

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Post WWI German author, understandably focused on Hitler / Nazism but also on mental health. Lively, well drawn and absorbing, pleasantly confusing, with a little magical realism thrown in for good measure.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novella "Soul of Wood" is essential, one of the best things I've read in a long time. The additional stories in this collection vary in quality but all have moments of brilliance.

[Daniel Clausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Soul of Wood” by Jakov Lind - A Review of Sorts

It was more than twenty years ago that I took a class on Holocaust literature. I remember that the class had a thick collected volume of collected essays, stories, and poems. I remember a soft-spoken Jewish man insisting that the Holocaust was beyond comprehension. I remember being in my early 20s and hormonal beyond redemption. I remember horrors that turned my heart cold. I remember prose that was beautiful and tragic. I remember having to read much of the work when I was tired…and I remember Jakov Lind.

As a man with thinning hair in his early 40s, I want to do something dangerous and romantic. I want to read Jakov Lind’s “Soul of Wood” and write about it not academically but romantically. I want to feel that initial thrill of stumbling upon this largely unknown writer’s work.

Much like two of my other literary essays – “Youth and its Discontents” (https://ghostsofnagasaki.wordpress.co... ) and “Lester Goran’s Last Song” (https://ghostsofnagasaki.wordpress.co... ) – this essay is as much about me as it is about the particular books.

Thus, I try to imagine myself as I must have been at 20 or 21 writing an essay on Lind’s story “Resurrection”. I must have been slightly mad, sleep-deprived, a desperate person trying to squeeze a fifteen-page double-spaced paper out of a story that was not that much longer. As always when I wrote literary essays in my early 20s, I was desperately trying to find something clever to say.

“Religious Identity in the Shadow of the Final Solution: An Interpretation of Jakov Lind’s “Resurrection” through Talmudic Hair-Splitting”

That was the title of the paper. A pretentious title for a young man always desperately trying to prove to the world how smart he was.

An aside: in the introduction to “Soul of Wood,” Michael Kruger writes this: “And yet even today we stand bewildered by how rapidly and smoothly this once liberal region of Central Europe could submit to Hilter’s demented bidding, how easily and unblinkingly it rejected modernity–for us the prerequisite for understanding humanity and the world” (p. ix).

I think if we are to truly study the Holocaust (or Chile, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur…and on and on), then we can no longer use the words “bewildered” and “incomprehensible.” If we want to use these words, let us use them as priests, poets, and moralizers instead of serious students of atrocities. Savagery is our default, and the decline from modernity to savagery, a very steep descent, usually happens so fast that we are better off studying when decline is stunted or arrested altogether. We should be “bewildered” when countries lose wars, incur rapid inflation, or suffer some horrific tragedy (and do not have an occupying army telling them to be pacifist) and yet somehow remain sensible and open minded. (Yes, the Joker in the “Dark Knight” had it right: Madness is like gravity. All we need is a little push.)

I am reading “Soul of Wood.” Here is the description that is written on Goodreads.

Set during World War II, "Soul of Wood" is the story of Wohlbrecht, a peg-legged veteran of World War I, who smuggles Anton Barth, a paralyzed Jewish boy, to a mountain hideout after the boy's parents have been sent to their deaths. Abandoning the helpless boy to the elements, Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna, where, having been committed to an insane asylum, he helps the chief psychiatrist to administer lethal injections to other patients. But Germany is collapsing, and the war will soon be over. The one way, Wohlbrecht realizes, that he can evade retribution is by returning to the woods to redeem "his" hidden Jew. Others, however, have had the same bright idea.

That is a very good description of a very surreal and winding story.

The central relationship of “Soul of Wood” is the relationship between the Jewish cripple Barth and the peg-legged old war veteran Wohlbrecht. But what makes the relationship so fascinating is the ambiguity in their relationship. Why does Wohlbrecht keep the Jewish cripple alive? Because of some personal code? Because of some shred of decency inside of him? A sense of old fashioned honor? Or, because deep down he sees the Jewish cripple as an insurance policy, some proof of his humanity within an inhumane regime? Like much of Lind’s writing, there is this haunting feeling that underneath our civilized veneer lie selfish motivations tied to our desire to breathe.

But the tapestry between these two characters is somehow so much richer than that. The old war veteran and the crippled Jew…there is a kind of father / son dynamic that forms over time. Despite Wohlbrecht’s paranoia, his missteps, the occasional evil thoughts in his head, we get the sense that he is a rare thing in this world: good.

Somehow, the story seems so much less interesting when Barth and Wohlbrecht are separated.

In the end, after the story of “Soul of Wood” goes through its tortuous and surrealist twists and turns, Wohlbrecht is finally reunited with Barth. Barth has become a kind of magic forest creature. As for Wohlbrecht…he is shot unceremoniously, his wooden leg propped up against a tree. And then, we are introduced to the idea of resurrection…a subject we will come back to in a later story.

Something I was smart enough to recognize as a young undergraduate, breathing plays an important role in Jakov Lind’s work. In “Soul of Wood,” Lind writes: “Anton had made an art of breathing. Breathing (not ordinary unconscious inhaling and exhaling) was his happiest occupation. It was his private art, not unlike music (for he used certain rhythms, though there was no melody) and not unlike poetry because it provoked distinct states of feeling” (p. 14-15). Eleven years after I had read these lines, I would need to take care of my mom who was suffering from COPD. Only then did I realize just how important breathing is to people. Now, nine years after my mom has passed, I try to remember how much joy she took in each breath. Lind’s words and Anton’s art take on new meaning for me.

As for the second story, “Journey through the Night,” I encourage you to watch this very good short film based on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIS6...

It seems that Jakov Lind is not as forgotten as I thought.

What have I learned by taking this long, torturous journey through a book of my youth? Only the delight of the macabre, the bewildering joy of the surreal, and when everything else falls apart, be grateful for my ability to breathe.

[Andrea Horn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually crazy how a story where a paralyzed Jewish boy is callously abandoned in the woods by his opportunist elderly caretaker after his parents are sent to their deaths had me laughing out loud. So surprised and impressed by Lind’s ability to write such an amusing yet horrifically dark story.

I learned that Jakov Lind was an Austrian Jew who survived the war by adopting a false identity and literally working for the Nazi government. Can totally see how the twisted irony of his experience really informed his writing.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed the title novella for Lind's language and for the dark tones of the story. The rest of this collection proceeds in a similar vein of weird meanness and bizarre circumstances. In fact, these stories jump around the medium with no affinity for genre or categorization--and I love this elusive quality, dearly. Lind writes odd and wondrous fiction, and I am very happy to have read it.

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obscure, disturbing holocaust literature is a little hard to read on the train.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was written in a humourous/gentle way, which set an interesting tone/mood for the stories. I really enjoyed this book.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main story was pretty cool and the other ones were just alright

[Anja Declercq · Rating 4 out of 5]

In het Nederlands gelezen, gekocht voor 50 eurocent in het kringloopcentrum. Donkere humor en simpelweg een erg goed boek.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have given this a perfectly average two and a half stars if I could, but Journey Through the Night deserves that little extra credit.

The title story has an interesting premise: a paralysed jew hidden away to die in the forest suddenly gains the ability to walk and he runs around with the deer. Too bad most of the story is taken up by the blatherings of his former caretaker and about how he got himself commited into an asylum. The whole wild man thing comes into it only a few pages before the end, barely any time is spent on it and the story just sort of ends.

The Pious Brother is kind of a pointless and lengthy diatribe about a priest and former SS man trying to cocktease women and then killing himself while dressing up as the jew he killed.....I think.

The Judgement is about a mass murderer getting strangled by his father in prison a few days before his scheduled execution. The idea is workable but ironically enough this story never develops it's characters properly to let any of that sink in....which is the opposite flaw of the previous two stories.

The Window is....a really odd thing. So apparently this one guy who lives in an apartment complex lives next door to Jesus and he shows him a woman without an ass and demands the dude's penis be chopped off in return but then changes his mind ? I think ?

Hurrah for Freedom is....even stranger. A guy runs into a family of Lithuanian nudists who live in a house without rooms under the suspended corpse of a horse and eat their own children.....and then just goes away. Not sure if you'd call this surreal, it's mostly played oddly straight.

Resurrection is the story about two Jews hiding until they're discovered and sent to die in a camp. It's got more characterisation than most of these stories and works, more or less.

And Journey Through the Night, second tale in the book but singled out by me as the best. It's a simple, short story of a man getting locked in with a cannibal on the train to Paris, who tries to convince the man how much better off he'd be when dead. It's short, sweet and the confusing editing where sentences aren't separated from descriptions or narration by any means works better here given the nightmarish, insane atmosphere of the story. Whereas everywhere else it just makes the text bleed together into a hard to read mess.

Not the worst I've read but definitely not worth the high praises some people shower on it.

[Viet · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Confused thoughts came to them in their half-sleep. They saw Anton’s open eyes, large and brown and without lashes, they saw Wohlbrecht’s eyes, blue, honest, perhaps a little watery. Dr Barth murmured: Adonai, and Mrs Barth moved her lips and seemed to want to say Mama. The train whistle blew again and again. Anton’s eyes grew larger and in the end they were as big as the Black Sea—as big and mad as Odessa—as loud as the market, as shiny as the ships on the sea. The steamers’ engines kept pounding out the song: Razhinkes un mandlen—raisins and almonds will be your trade. But I became a doctor. Mrs Barth saw the great rabbi of Chernigev who had taught the mute Rivkele to speak. The doctor and his wife were both from Odessa, and even in dying they were still in the same street where they had played together at the age of four. And now they were both on their way back to Odessa. With a detour, to be sure, by way of Vienna, a forty-year detour and a crippled son left behind, they were going home to their parents and relatives who were also long dead.

But they never reached Odessa. In the little Polish town of Oswiecim they were taken of the train by men in uniform and cremated the same day."

[Hannah Rehman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Without love I don't want it…What's the use, I tell myself. It's no good without love.” Lind’s collection of short stories displayed a profound amount of wisdom, emotion, and depth. With concise and impactful writing, he was able to fit a range of potent emotions that left me in a reflective state. A unique collection of stories that I would definitely recommend.

[Paddyspub · Rating 3 out of 5]

6.7/10

Maybe this style of writing just doesn't work with me compared to other people. I enjoyed these stories and the characters very much but there is something about Lind's style of writing that just falls flat with me. Journey Through the Night is delightfully creepy.

[David Way · Rating 3 out of 5]

Soul of wood itself as a novella is like 4 stars. Good story the absurd stuff is fine…the stories after that are a mix of either good or absolutely terrible. The final story I didn’t finish sort of unreadable

[Ian Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title novella was chilling and disorienting, but still brilliant in the way it was composed. The remaining shorts were mildly disturbing surrealist strokes, but none was super memorable.