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Danielis Štainas, vertėjas
Šis romanas – tai spalvinga mozaika, sudaryta iš įvairių tautybių, daugiausia žydų, ir įvairias religijas išpažįstančių žmonių likimų. Juos visus vienija karmelitų vienuolis brolis Danielis, realiame pasaulyje turėjęs savo prototipą Oswaldą Rufeiseną (1922–1998).
Keistas darinys: jis – apsikrikštijęs žydas, katalikų kunigas, karmelitas vienuolis. Gyvena vienuolyne ant Karmelio kalno, Izraelyje, Haifos mieste, ir vadovauja mažai, bet įvairiatautei nepasiturinčių atklydėlių iš įvairių pasaulio kraštų katalikų bendruomenei. Važinėja apsižergęs motorolerį. Pragyvenimui užsidirba lydėdamas ekskursijas po Šventąją Žemę. Antrojo pasaulinio karo metais, kol naciai neatskleidė jo tautybės – vertėjas gestape, vis dėl to spėjęs išgelbėti šimtus myriop pasmerktų geto žydų.
Gyvenimas Lenkijoje, Lietuvoje, Baltarusijoje ir po karo sunkiai gauta iš Izraelio valdžios pilietybė, tačiau be teisės vadintis žydu – dėl to, kad yra katalikas, krikščionis, neskirstantis žmonių nei pagal tautybę, nei pagal tikėjimą. Brolis Danielis Štainas – Vertėjas didžiąja raide, nes jo gyvenimo pašaukimas – būti tarpininku tarp susipriešinusių tautų ir religijų, o kartais, atrodytų, netgi tarp Dievo ir žmogaus.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
108 people are currently reading
2238 people want to read
About the author
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
125 books1,036 followersRussian profile here Людмила Улицкая
Lyudmila Ulitskaya is a critically acclaimed modern Russian novelist and short-story writer. She was born in the town of Davlekanovo in Bashkiria in 1943. She grew up in Moscow where she studied biology at the Moscow State University.
Having worked in the field of genetics and biochemistry, Ulitskaya began her literary career by joining the Jewish drama theatre as a literary consultant. She was the author of two movie scripts produced in the early 1990s — The Liberty Sisters (Сестрички Либерти, 1990) and A Woman for All (Женщина для всех, 1991).
Ulitskaya's first novel Sonechka (Сонечка) published in Novy Mir in 1992 almost immediately became extremely popular, and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Award. Nowadays her works are much admired by the reading public and critics in Russia and many other countries. Her works have been translated into several languages and received several international and Russian literary awards, including the Russian Booker for Kukotsky's Case (2001). Lyudmila Ulitskaya currently resides in Moscow. Ulitskaya's works have been translated into many foreign languages. In Germany her novels have been added to bestseller list thanks to features of her works in a television program hosted by literary critic Elke Heidenreich.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya is a critically acclaimed modern Russian novelist and short-story writer. She was born in the town of Davlekanovo in Bashkiria in 1943. She grew up in Moscow where she studied biology at the Moscow State University.
Having worked in the field of genetics and biochemistry, Ulitskaya began her literary career by joining the Jewish drama theatre as a literary consultant. She was the author of two movie scripts produced in the early 1990s — The Liberty Sisters (Сестрички Либерти, 1990) and A Woman for All (Женщина для всех, 1991).
Ulitskaya's first novel Sonechka (Сонечка) published in Novy Mir in 1992 almost immediately became extremely popular, and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Award. Nowadays her works are much admired by the reading public and critics in Russia and many other countries. Her works have been translated into several languages and received several international and Russian literary awards, including the Russian Booker for Kukotsky's Case (2001). Lyudmila Ulitskaya currently resides in Moscow. Ulitskaya's works have been translated into many foreign languages. In Germany her novels have been added to bestseller list thanks to features of her works in a television program hosted by literary critic Elke Heidenreich.
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May 7, 2023
The Heresy That Dare Not Speak Its Name
In the 14th century Catherine of Siena rebuked Pope Gregory XI for allowing lax behaviour among the clergy, and for his own behaviour by remaining in Avignon rather than re-establishing residence in Rome. She got away with it because what she didn't question was papal authority, particularly the authority to define and enforce belief. She could only chide and appeal to conscience, and even then never assert her own conscience as in any way equal to the pope's.
Shmuel Oswald Rufeisen, also known as Brother Daniel and the model for the central fictional character of Daniel Stein in Lyudmila Ulitskaya's novel, is a Polish Jew who becomes a Carmelite friar and spends most of his adult life in Israel ministering to a small congregation of Hebrew-speaking Christians near Haifa.
Brother Daniel has learned to mistrust authority, particularly ideological authority which attempts to regulate belief. He takes his own conscience more seriously than Catherine did hers. And, unlike Catherine, he does not try to impose his views on others. He neither chides nor condemns his congregants or his ecclesiastical superiors. He simply trusts his own conscientious judgment more than the judgment of those who have power over him. And with good reason.
As a teenager he was pressed into service with the Gestapo and forced to participate in the extermination of Lithuanian and Belorussian Jews, many of whom he knew personally. Narrowly escaping from execution by the Communist partisans, Daniel received both the Stalin and Lenin medals for bravery from the Soviet Union but was under suspicion of Polish nationalism.
Daniel was also critical of the life of the church, somewhat more radically, if less outspokenly, than Catherine. Ulitskaya puts words in the mouth of the fictional Daniel which very well could have been in the mind of the real Carmelite friar: "We know that in every age it has been raw politics which has determined the direction of the life of the Church." For Daniel the politics of authority is the same in the church as it is in government or corporate life, namely an attempt to impose belief in the interests of authority itself. And he won't have it.
Doctrine, according to Daniel, is a political not a religious, and even less a spiritual, matter. Both historically and socially; doctrine is used to identify Us vs. Them and as test of social solidarity. Authority is that which defines the identity and supervises the test. What he encounters in the Church is qualitatively no different from his experience with Nazi and Communist military and civil authority.
What matters for Daniel, however, is not doctrine per se, or even its implications for behaviour towards others, but behaviour itself defined in terms of the Christ-mandated rule of charity. Ulitskaya puts the point in the mouth of his assistant: "I recognise that what you believe doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you personally behave…Daniel has placed that right in my heart." Ethics for Daniel cannot be derived from doctrinal belief, which is merely an expression of power and submission.
This is of course heresy, and Daniel recognises his position: "Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation." But he turns the apparent heresy on its head: "Great faith, simplicity and boldness are to be found in [the] reluctance to acknowledge grandeur and power." If heresy it be, it is virtuous heresy which goes beyond the tentative virtue of Catherine.
The real heresy, which Daniel comprehends, is not to recognise the central message of Christ: the "expansion of love." To subjugate this message to the needs of authority is always and everywhere destructive to this message and therefore wrong. Daniel sweeps the entire Church into a position that would have given Catherine palpitations even though he is only paraphrasing St. Paul: "[Christ] did not hand down any new dogmas, and the novelty of his teaching is that he placed Love above the Law."
It is the failure to admit this real heresy that is the root of Christianity's problems - within itself and with the world - from its inception in Daniel's view: "The Church drove out and cursed the Jews and has paid for that by all its subsequent divisions and schisms." In Daniel's defence Ulitskaya provides a plethora of Christian, Jewish and Muslim examples of the true heresy of authority, its obvious ubiquity and its consequences in prejudice, intolerance, psychosis, and terrorism over the centuries.
Of course, Daniel is ultimately no match for the persistence of authority, which merely replicates itself within the 'everlasting' corporate structure of the Church. Authority marginalises him, and waits him out. His church is closed, his congregation scattered, his annoyance to the hierarchy of the Order and the bishops is all but forgotten. So: "[Daniel’s] specific mission had failed…working as a priest, praising Yeshua in his own language, preaching christianity with a small c, a personal religion of the mercy and love of God and of one’s neighbour, and not the religion of dogmas and authority, power and totalitarianism."
Paradoxically this has always been the real criterion of success for the message of Christ. His little Church on the slopes of Mount Carmel could only ever be temporary and unprotected against the world. One can mourn but only triumphantly, as Daniel's followers do: "Poor Christianity! It can be only poor. Any victorious Church…totally rejects Christ."
Daniel Stein addresses the heresy which Catherine would not: that authority is superior to individual conscience. Individual conscience is certainly not the basis for general mores. But neither is it any less authoritative than the consciences of those with rank and privilege. Any authority - the pope, the text, or a theologically-educated interpreter - when it attempts to impose belief is wrong.
This is the heresy that dare not speak its name within polite religious society. It is the heresy that is at the root of the decline in Christianity. It is the essential untruth rather than the fundamental virtue of any organisation putting itself forward as promoter of the message of Christ. It is Daniel Stein not Catherine of Siena who has practiced that virtue unequivocally.
In the 14th century Catherine of Siena rebuked Pope Gregory XI for allowing lax behaviour among the clergy, and for his own behaviour by remaining in Avignon rather than re-establishing residence in Rome. She got away with it because what she didn't question was papal authority, particularly the authority to define and enforce belief. She could only chide and appeal to conscience, and even then never assert her own conscience as in any way equal to the pope's.
Shmuel Oswald Rufeisen, also known as Brother Daniel and the model for the central fictional character of Daniel Stein in Lyudmila Ulitskaya's novel, is a Polish Jew who becomes a Carmelite friar and spends most of his adult life in Israel ministering to a small congregation of Hebrew-speaking Christians near Haifa.
Brother Daniel has learned to mistrust authority, particularly ideological authority which attempts to regulate belief. He takes his own conscience more seriously than Catherine did hers. And, unlike Catherine, he does not try to impose his views on others. He neither chides nor condemns his congregants or his ecclesiastical superiors. He simply trusts his own conscientious judgment more than the judgment of those who have power over him. And with good reason.
As a teenager he was pressed into service with the Gestapo and forced to participate in the extermination of Lithuanian and Belorussian Jews, many of whom he knew personally. Narrowly escaping from execution by the Communist partisans, Daniel received both the Stalin and Lenin medals for bravery from the Soviet Union but was under suspicion of Polish nationalism.
Daniel was also critical of the life of the church, somewhat more radically, if less outspokenly, than Catherine. Ulitskaya puts words in the mouth of the fictional Daniel which very well could have been in the mind of the real Carmelite friar: "We know that in every age it has been raw politics which has determined the direction of the life of the Church." For Daniel the politics of authority is the same in the church as it is in government or corporate life, namely an attempt to impose belief in the interests of authority itself. And he won't have it.
Doctrine, according to Daniel, is a political not a religious, and even less a spiritual, matter. Both historically and socially; doctrine is used to identify Us vs. Them and as test of social solidarity. Authority is that which defines the identity and supervises the test. What he encounters in the Church is qualitatively no different from his experience with Nazi and Communist military and civil authority.
What matters for Daniel, however, is not doctrine per se, or even its implications for behaviour towards others, but behaviour itself defined in terms of the Christ-mandated rule of charity. Ulitskaya puts the point in the mouth of his assistant: "I recognise that what you believe doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you personally behave…Daniel has placed that right in my heart." Ethics for Daniel cannot be derived from doctrinal belief, which is merely an expression of power and submission.
This is of course heresy, and Daniel recognises his position: "Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation." But he turns the apparent heresy on its head: "Great faith, simplicity and boldness are to be found in [the] reluctance to acknowledge grandeur and power." If heresy it be, it is virtuous heresy which goes beyond the tentative virtue of Catherine.
The real heresy, which Daniel comprehends, is not to recognise the central message of Christ: the "expansion of love." To subjugate this message to the needs of authority is always and everywhere destructive to this message and therefore wrong. Daniel sweeps the entire Church into a position that would have given Catherine palpitations even though he is only paraphrasing St. Paul: "[Christ] did not hand down any new dogmas, and the novelty of his teaching is that he placed Love above the Law."
It is the failure to admit this real heresy that is the root of Christianity's problems - within itself and with the world - from its inception in Daniel's view: "The Church drove out and cursed the Jews and has paid for that by all its subsequent divisions and schisms." In Daniel's defence Ulitskaya provides a plethora of Christian, Jewish and Muslim examples of the true heresy of authority, its obvious ubiquity and its consequences in prejudice, intolerance, psychosis, and terrorism over the centuries.
Of course, Daniel is ultimately no match for the persistence of authority, which merely replicates itself within the 'everlasting' corporate structure of the Church. Authority marginalises him, and waits him out. His church is closed, his congregation scattered, his annoyance to the hierarchy of the Order and the bishops is all but forgotten. So: "[Daniel’s] specific mission had failed…working as a priest, praising Yeshua in his own language, preaching christianity with a small c, a personal religion of the mercy and love of God and of one’s neighbour, and not the religion of dogmas and authority, power and totalitarianism."
Paradoxically this has always been the real criterion of success for the message of Christ. His little Church on the slopes of Mount Carmel could only ever be temporary and unprotected against the world. One can mourn but only triumphantly, as Daniel's followers do: "Poor Christianity! It can be only poor. Any victorious Church…totally rejects Christ."
Daniel Stein addresses the heresy which Catherine would not: that authority is superior to individual conscience. Individual conscience is certainly not the basis for general mores. But neither is it any less authoritative than the consciences of those with rank and privilege. Any authority - the pope, the text, or a theologically-educated interpreter - when it attempts to impose belief is wrong.
This is the heresy that dare not speak its name within polite religious society. It is the heresy that is at the root of the decline in Christianity. It is the essential untruth rather than the fundamental virtue of any organisation putting itself forward as promoter of the message of Christ. It is Daniel Stein not Catherine of Siena who has practiced that virtue unequivocally.
July 5, 2020
I opened this book having no expectations. And what a surprise!
Daniel Stein is a Jew who was granted many lives during the Holocaust, converts to Christianity and becomes a priest in Izrael. He is the main character, however, there are others, who tell their stories and that of Daniel's in many different forms of narration such as interviews, letters, documents etc.
This is a novel showing what it means to try to be a good person in spite of everything, what it takes to search your identity and to seek redemption for sins committed by ancestors.
Read in Polish.
Daniel Stein is a Jew who was granted many lives during the Holocaust, converts to Christianity and becomes a priest in Izrael. He is the main character, however, there are others, who tell their stories and that of Daniel's in many different forms of narration such as interviews, letters, documents etc.
This is a novel showing what it means to try to be a good person in spite of everything, what it takes to search your identity and to seek redemption for sins committed by ancestors.
Read in Polish.
July 19, 2018
Sin palabras. Acabo de terminarlo y tengo la sensación de haber leído un libro extenso, de más de 500 páginas. Debo aclarar que cuando empecé a leerlo no tenía ni idea de lo que me iba a encontrar, sencillamente leí por encima la sinopsis y me hice una idea. Una idea muy equivocada. La historia es en su mayor parte epistolar, y narra la vida de unos judios que sobrevivieron durante el nazismo. Sobre todo la vida del padre Daniel Stein, un judío que se convirtió al catolicismo. Es más, en toda la obra, predomina el conflicto judío cristiano, la fe y los hombres en su idea de quién es Dios.
April 4, 2022
De ce i-am dat cinci stele? Pentru universalismul lumii descrise, pentru istoria acelui Ydishland atât de vast înainte de pactul ruso-nazist, pentru puzzle-ul stilistic al narațiunii, pentru polifonie, pentru utopia viziunii lui Daniel Stein, pentru umanismul și spiritul critic al scriitoarei. Nu cred c-am apreciat vreodată atât de mult o carte a cărei esență se-nvârte în jurul credinței, a crezului sau a bisericii. O recomand atât credincioșilor, agnosticilor,ateilor cât și, mai ales, slujitorilor bisericilor de orice rit sau confesiune.
September 15, 2019
„Kedves Ljaja! Írok és ömlik a könnyem. Nem vagyok igazi író. Az igazi író nem sír.”
(Ljudmila Ulickaja levele Jelena Kosztyukovicsnak)
Kedves Ljudmila! Ön igazi író – mert az igazi író sír. No persze, ez megint túlzás, mert hát annyi író van, aki igazi, és mind másféle. A jók olyan sokfélék, pont ez a jó bennük. A rosszak meg majd elmennek mentorálni valakit. Ön történelmet és vallástörténetet fordít: irodalomra. Ezt lehetne szenvtelenül is, de Önnek üzenete van, és ezt nagyon becsülöm. Ön talált egy csodálatos figurát, Daniel Steint, a zsidóból lett kármelita szerzetest, embermentőt, aki meglátta Jézusban a farizeusokkal vitázót, és ebből le is szűrte a tanulságot: a Szeretet nagyobb, mint a Törvény. És nem hogy leszűrte: annak szellemében is élte le életét. Daniel Stein megkapó, gazdag jelenség, nem csodálom, hogy amikor ábrázolni igyekszik őt, szétesik a lineáris cselekmény apró törmelékekre: levelekre, interjúkra, újságcikkekre. Merthogy Daniel olyan, akit nem lehet a hagyományos epika korlátai közé szorítani. De szabadjon megjegyeznem, Ön a szükségből erényt kovácsolt, mert ez a szétesett dokumentum(?)regény mindennél tökéletesebben illusztrálja a különböző hangok kakofóniáját, és egyben módot is nyújt számtalan fiktív szereplőjének, hogy megvédje saját nézeteit.
Az előbb azt írtam: Önnek üzenete van. Ezt még megfejelem picit: Ön didaktikus. Minden sora arról a mély bizonyosságról tanúskodik, hogy nem számít, miben hiszünk, a lényeg, hogy mit teszünk. Regényében a szereplők közötti törésvonalak nem vallásuk mentén képződnek, mert nem az az érdekes, hogy valaki katolikus, protestáns, ortodox, muzulmán vagy zsidó. A törésvonalak e csoportokon belül vannak: elválnak egymástól azok, akik képesek elfogadni, ha valaki különbözik tőlük, és azok, akik egyneműségre törekszenek. Maguk a csoportok szakadnak pluralistákra és fundamentalistákra – és ha közöttük nem lehet megegyezés, akkor ugyan hogy lehetne a különböző felekezetek között? Gyorsan megjegyezném: én nem szeretem a didaktikus prózát. De ezt a szöveget szerettem – adja magát a válasz, miért: mert egyetértek Önnel. És mert: Ön igazi író. Ön írt egy szép-keserű prózát az emberiségről. Van benne sok fájdalom, sok hit, és sok jó ember. És van benne egy Daniel Stein, akit külön megköszönök Önnek. Jó, hogy megírta őt, hogy irodalommá tette – egy könyv ér annyit, mint egy szobor. Még ha a galambok másképp is gondolják.
(Ljudmila Ulickaja levele Jelena Kosztyukovicsnak)
Kedves Ljudmila! Ön igazi író – mert az igazi író sír. No persze, ez megint túlzás, mert hát annyi író van, aki igazi, és mind másféle. A jók olyan sokfélék, pont ez a jó bennük. A rosszak meg majd elmennek mentorálni valakit. Ön történelmet és vallástörténetet fordít: irodalomra. Ezt lehetne szenvtelenül is, de Önnek üzenete van, és ezt nagyon becsülöm. Ön talált egy csodálatos figurát, Daniel Steint, a zsidóból lett kármelita szerzetest, embermentőt, aki meglátta Jézusban a farizeusokkal vitázót, és ebből le is szűrte a tanulságot: a Szeretet nagyobb, mint a Törvény. És nem hogy leszűrte: annak szellemében is élte le életét. Daniel Stein megkapó, gazdag jelenség, nem csodálom, hogy amikor ábrázolni igyekszik őt, szétesik a lineáris cselekmény apró törmelékekre: levelekre, interjúkra, újságcikkekre. Merthogy Daniel olyan, akit nem lehet a hagyományos epika korlátai közé szorítani. De szabadjon megjegyeznem, Ön a szükségből erényt kovácsolt, mert ez a szétesett dokumentum(?)regény mindennél tökéletesebben illusztrálja a különböző hangok kakofóniáját, és egyben módot is nyújt számtalan fiktív szereplőjének, hogy megvédje saját nézeteit.
Az előbb azt írtam: Önnek üzenete van. Ezt még megfejelem picit: Ön didaktikus. Minden sora arról a mély bizonyosságról tanúskodik, hogy nem számít, miben hiszünk, a lényeg, hogy mit teszünk. Regényében a szereplők közötti törésvonalak nem vallásuk mentén képződnek, mert nem az az érdekes, hogy valaki katolikus, protestáns, ortodox, muzulmán vagy zsidó. A törésvonalak e csoportokon belül vannak: elválnak egymástól azok, akik képesek elfogadni, ha valaki különbözik tőlük, és azok, akik egyneműségre törekszenek. Maguk a csoportok szakadnak pluralistákra és fundamentalistákra – és ha közöttük nem lehet megegyezés, akkor ugyan hogy lehetne a különböző felekezetek között? Gyorsan megjegyezném: én nem szeretem a didaktikus prózát. De ezt a szöveget szerettem – adja magát a válasz, miért: mert egyetértek Önnel. És mert: Ön igazi író. Ön írt egy szép-keserű prózát az emberiségről. Van benne sok fájdalom, sok hit, és sok jó ember. És van benne egy Daniel Stein, akit külön megköszönök Önnek. Jó, hogy megírta őt, hogy irodalommá tette – egy könyv ér annyit, mint egy szobor. Még ha a galambok másképp is gondolják.
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June 14, 2013According to the publisher, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel, Daniel Stein, Interpreter (published in the original in 2006), is “seen by many as the great Russian novel of our time.” Such a generous description may enlarge the number of readers, but it also runs the risk of raising the expectations too high. Personally, I might have enjoyed the novel more if I hadn’t read it with the constant hope that some great revelation will occur at some point (it didn’t).
My feelings about the novel have remained ambivalent from the beginning to the end. On the one hand, I admired the writer’s ambitious project, as she built a mosaic made of dozens of fragments (i.e., all the characters, each bringing his/her own perspective and story to the Greater Story of Israel). Structurally, the novel is very interesting and daring: written without a unifying “I,” it is a polyphonic novel made of multiple voices, and, although there is a voice that is stronger than the others—that of Brother Daniel, based on a real person—in the end, all the voices mingle to create a unique, hymn-like tapestry. Even the author appears with her own name at the end of each part—the novel has five parts—in a letter that addresses both her personal situation at that particular moment and her difficulties in putting together the novel. Indeed, most of the novel is made of letters written by different characters, or (tape) recordings of conversations between them, or speeches made by Brother Daniel on various occasions, in which he narrates his incredible life as a Polish Jew who worked as an interpreter for both the Gestapo and the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), trying in the process to save as many lives as possible, and who, eventually, converted to Catholicism and moved to Israel.
But a novel with as many voices as this one is not easy to write, and this is where the writer comes short. Many of the voices sound the same, and some, in particular the American characters, are quite implausible. When Alex, an American teenager, informs his mother in writing that he is gay, and uses words like “bound by such vital passion,��� the implausibility reaches such peaks that it’s almost comical. Some negative reviews of the novel have mentioned its “flat tone,” but I would rather describe the tone as restrained, and the style as paralleling in its asceticism Brother Daniel’s monastic life. There is a certain serenity that comes off the page, and this is no doubt because the simplicity of the style matches the content of the descriptions. And then, there are the numerous, long paragraphs in which various characters reflect on Judaism and Christianity, which I found intelligent and informative, but others might find tedious. All in all, this is an impressive historical document (indeed, not only Brother Daniel, but other characters have existed, or still do, in real life), but I am not sure it is a very successful novel. The main problem stems from its very premise: Brother Daniel is conceived as a model of humanity, and the entire novel, starting with the author’s foreword, reinforces this idea, as well as its corollary, the necessity of tolerance and understanding between people. I’m all for tolerance and understanding, but I don’t know of any great work of literature based on such an unambiguous, let’s-all-hold-hands kind of message. Ambiguity is (at) the heart of literature, and it is not an accident that the novel’s most vivid character is the least “positive” or “inspiring:” Rita Kowacz, the inflexible Communist and bad mother, who became a Protestant before dying.
My feelings about the novel have remained ambivalent from the beginning to the end. On the one hand, I admired the writer’s ambitious project, as she built a mosaic made of dozens of fragments (i.e., all the characters, each bringing his/her own perspective and story to the Greater Story of Israel). Structurally, the novel is very interesting and daring: written without a unifying “I,” it is a polyphonic novel made of multiple voices, and, although there is a voice that is stronger than the others—that of Brother Daniel, based on a real person—in the end, all the voices mingle to create a unique, hymn-like tapestry. Even the author appears with her own name at the end of each part—the novel has five parts—in a letter that addresses both her personal situation at that particular moment and her difficulties in putting together the novel. Indeed, most of the novel is made of letters written by different characters, or (tape) recordings of conversations between them, or speeches made by Brother Daniel on various occasions, in which he narrates his incredible life as a Polish Jew who worked as an interpreter for both the Gestapo and the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), trying in the process to save as many lives as possible, and who, eventually, converted to Catholicism and moved to Israel.
But a novel with as many voices as this one is not easy to write, and this is where the writer comes short. Many of the voices sound the same, and some, in particular the American characters, are quite implausible. When Alex, an American teenager, informs his mother in writing that he is gay, and uses words like “bound by such vital passion,��� the implausibility reaches such peaks that it’s almost comical. Some negative reviews of the novel have mentioned its “flat tone,” but I would rather describe the tone as restrained, and the style as paralleling in its asceticism Brother Daniel’s monastic life. There is a certain serenity that comes off the page, and this is no doubt because the simplicity of the style matches the content of the descriptions. And then, there are the numerous, long paragraphs in which various characters reflect on Judaism and Christianity, which I found intelligent and informative, but others might find tedious. All in all, this is an impressive historical document (indeed, not only Brother Daniel, but other characters have existed, or still do, in real life), but I am not sure it is a very successful novel. The main problem stems from its very premise: Brother Daniel is conceived as a model of humanity, and the entire novel, starting with the author’s foreword, reinforces this idea, as well as its corollary, the necessity of tolerance and understanding between people. I’m all for tolerance and understanding, but I don’t know of any great work of literature based on such an unambiguous, let’s-all-hold-hands kind of message. Ambiguity is (at) the heart of literature, and it is not an accident that the novel’s most vivid character is the least “positive” or “inspiring:” Rita Kowacz, the inflexible Communist and bad mother, who became a Protestant before dying.
December 23, 2021
Spre final și printre mai multe perdele de fum găsești câteva indicii care te duc, dacă faci mici investigații, ca mine, la povestea reală care stă la baza acestui roman epistolar. El reconstituie portretul (ficționalizat, dar nu în punctele esențiale) lui Oswald Rufeisen, evreu polonez care se folosește de talentul lui extraordinar pentru limbi străine ca să treacă drept german în timpul Holocaustului și, ca traducător pentru Gestapo, reușește să salveze sute de evrei și creștini de la moarte in orașul Mir (în carte, Emsk). După război se convertește la catolicism (o mănăstire de călugărițe catolice fusese singurul loc în care găsise refugiu odată ce e demascat), apoi ajunge preot catolic în Israel.
Personajul Daniel Stein e, mai presus de toate, un traducător al cuvântului lui Dumnezeu pentru catolici, ortodocși, evrei și musulmani. Pentru toți cei pe care îi întâlnește. Crede că Biserica adevărată este creștină și evreiască, așa cum a fost prima Biserică, cea a primilor discipoli ai lui Isus - Biserica lui Iacov. Dar, mai presus de orice, crede că adevărata religie înseamnă iubire și compasiune, nimic mai mult.
Portretul lui este reconstruit din scrisori (de personaje ficționalizate sau inventate cu totul), mărturii ale celor care l-au cunoscut, cercetări de cărti despre el și completat cu imaginația scriitoarei. După fiecare dintre cele cinci părți Ulițkaia intervine cu câte o (presupusă) scrisoare către editoarea ei, în care ne amintește că suntem într-o ficțiune. Vocea din off, Deus ex machina. Mi s-au părut nu prea reușite și lungite inutil intervențiile ei, cu excepția penultimei, în care își expune opinia despre religie (nevoia de credință, dezamăgirea față de Biserică, mai ales cea rusă).
Bineînțeles că Israelul, țara în care totul e concentrat la intensitate maximă și care încă funcționează ca o matrice spirituală pentru lume e un personaj la fel de important ca Daniel. Presupun că și adevăratul părinte Daniel și Ulițkaia ar vrea ca personajul principal să fie Isus și Biserica lui universală, unde toți ar trebui să ne reintâlnim. Isus, cel care "a pus Iubirea mai presus de Lege". Dar cred ca a fost o ambiție puțin prea mare pentru cartea asta, care are, totuși, foarte multe merite.
Personajul Daniel Stein e, mai presus de toate, un traducător al cuvântului lui Dumnezeu pentru catolici, ortodocși, evrei și musulmani. Pentru toți cei pe care îi întâlnește. Crede că Biserica adevărată este creștină și evreiască, așa cum a fost prima Biserică, cea a primilor discipoli ai lui Isus - Biserica lui Iacov. Dar, mai presus de orice, crede că adevărata religie înseamnă iubire și compasiune, nimic mai mult.
Portretul lui este reconstruit din scrisori (de personaje ficționalizate sau inventate cu totul), mărturii ale celor care l-au cunoscut, cercetări de cărti despre el și completat cu imaginația scriitoarei. După fiecare dintre cele cinci părți Ulițkaia intervine cu câte o (presupusă) scrisoare către editoarea ei, în care ne amintește că suntem într-o ficțiune. Vocea din off, Deus ex machina. Mi s-au părut nu prea reușite și lungite inutil intervențiile ei, cu excepția penultimei, în care își expune opinia despre religie (nevoia de credință, dezamăgirea față de Biserică, mai ales cea rusă).
Bineînțeles că Israelul, țara în care totul e concentrat la intensitate maximă și care încă funcționează ca o matrice spirituală pentru lume e un personaj la fel de important ca Daniel. Presupun că și adevăratul părinte Daniel și Ulițkaia ar vrea ca personajul principal să fie Isus și Biserica lui universală, unde toți ar trebui să ne reintâlnim. Isus, cel care "a pus Iubirea mai presus de Lege". Dar cred ca a fost o ambiție puțin prea mare pentru cartea asta, care are, totuși, foarte multe merite.
November 5, 2017
- Вечният еврейски въпрос малко ми дотегна, но се радвам, че навлязох още и още в него.
- Отчуждението ми към религиите си остана същото, не ми се четеше за тях, но се докоснах до едно мъничко важно и успокояващо прозрение.
- Въпросите за националната идентичност още ми се избистриха в моя посока.
- Открих чрез сравнение защо „дзен за мен“, а не нещо друго.
Нищо конкретно не мога (не искам?) да кажа за самия Даниел Щайн (и други интересни герои има), сякаш ползвах книгата по-скоро като изследване на горните теми. Четените досега книги на Людмила Улицкая повече ми харесаха, но тази ми беше ценна с различната си форма: „Книгата е конструирана като колаж от лични истории, разказани чрез писма, дневници, записи на беседи, а също и голям брой официални бележки, доклади, документи и жалби до властите.“
„Възможно е през дългия си живот да съм успял да направя няколко крачки по пътя към свободата, но това, с което определено не успях да се справя, е националността. Не успях да престана да бъда евреин. Еврейството е натрапчиво и авторитарно, проклета гърбица и прекрасен дар, то диктува логиката и начина на мислене, сковава и те обгръща като в пелена. То е неотменимо както пола. Еврейството ограничава свободата. Винаги съм искал да изляза отвъд неговите предели – излизах, отивах, където си искам – по други пътища, десет, двайсет, трийсет години, но в някой момент откривах, че не съм стигнал доникъде.“
„Повдигаше ми се от националната идея във всяка нейна трактовка.“
„Както и да се определят самите евреи, всъщност тях ги определят отвън: евреин е този, когото неевреите смятат за евреин. Затова на кръстените евреи не им правеха никакви отстъпки: и те бяха подложени на унищожение. Участието ми в Нюрнбергския процес бе по-тежко, отколкото пребиваването в гетото и при партизаните. Изгледаните филмови ленти, заснети от немците в концлагерите и от съюзниците след освобождението, подкопаха моето еврейско съзнание: не ми се искаше да бъда повече средноевропеец и заминахме за Палестина. Заминахме там, за да бъдем евреи. Но за такова нещо пък не ми достигаше еврейската маниакалност.“
„… въобще няма значение в какво вярваш, значение има само личното поведение.“
„Работата е там, че половината от живота си съм прекарал сред хора, търсещи Господ в книгите и обредите, които сами са измислили.“
„Масовите идеологии освобождават хората от морални устои, в младостта си бях носител на такива идеологии, а по-късно, оказвайки се на окупираната от фашистите територия – тяхна жертва.“
„В удостоверението ми за самоличност е написано: „националност“ – неопределена“!“
„Моят личен път е минал през Изтока. В младежките си години бях изкушен от будизма, възприемах неговата свобода като висше постижение. Практикувах будизма и бях стигнал доста далече по този път, но бях спрян от празнотата. В будизма няма Бог, а Господ се оказа за мен по-важен от свободата. Аз не исках да бъда свободен от Бога и Той ми се откри в Православието. Главният и най-плодотворен път е ортодоксалният. Не желая облекчено християнство.“
(Може „свободен с Бога“ – т.е. с любовта?)
- Отчуждението ми към религиите си остана същото, не ми се четеше за тях, но се докоснах до едно мъничко важно и успокояващо прозрение.
- Въпросите за националната идентичност още ми се избистриха в моя посока.
- Открих чрез сравнение защо „дзен за мен“, а не нещо друго.
Нищо конкретно не мога (не искам?) да кажа за самия Даниел Щайн (и други интересни герои има), сякаш ползвах книгата по-скоро като изследване на горните теми. Четените досега книги на Людмила Улицкая повече ми харесаха, но тази ми беше ценна с различната си форма: „Книгата е конструирана като колаж от лични истории, разказани чрез писма, дневници, записи на беседи, а също и голям брой официални бележки, доклади, документи и жалби до властите.“
„Възможно е през дългия си живот да съм успял да направя няколко крачки по пътя към свободата, но това, с което определено не успях да се справя, е националността. Не успях да престана да бъда евреин. Еврейството е натрапчиво и авторитарно, проклета гърбица и прекрасен дар, то диктува логиката и начина на мислене, сковава и те обгръща като в пелена. То е неотменимо както пола. Еврейството ограничава свободата. Винаги съм искал да изляза отвъд неговите предели – излизах, отивах, където си искам – по други пътища, десет, двайсет, трийсет години, но в някой момент откривах, че не съм стигнал доникъде.“
„Повдигаше ми се от националната идея във всяка нейна трактовка.“
„Както и да се определят самите евреи, всъщност тях ги определят отвън: евреин е този, когото неевреите смятат за евреин. Затова на кръстените евреи не им правеха никакви отстъпки: и те бяха подложени на унищожение. Участието ми в Нюрнбергския процес бе по-тежко, отколкото пребиваването в гетото и при партизаните. Изгледаните филмови ленти, заснети от немците в концлагерите и от съюзниците след освобождението, подкопаха моето еврейско съзнание: не ми се искаше да бъда повече средноевропеец и заминахме за Палестина. Заминахме там, за да бъдем евреи. Но за такова нещо пък не ми достигаше еврейската маниакалност.“
„… въобще няма значение в какво вярваш, значение има само личното поведение.“
„Работата е там, че половината от живота си съм прекарал сред хора, търсещи Господ в книгите и обредите, които сами са измислили.“
„Масовите идеологии освобождават хората от морални устои, в младостта си бях носител на такива идеологии, а по-късно, оказвайки се на окупираната от фашистите територия – тяхна жертва.“
„В удостоверението ми за самоличност е написано: „националност“ – неопределена“!“
„Моят личен път е минал през Изтока. В младежките си години бях изкушен от будизма, възприемах неговата свобода като висше постижение. Практикувах будизма и бях стигнал доста далече по този път, но бях спрян от празнотата. В будизма няма Бог, а Господ се оказа за мен по-важен от свободата. Аз не исках да бъда свободен от Бога и Той ми се откри в Православието. Главният и най-плодотворен път е ортодоксалният. Не желая облекчено християнство.“
(Може „свободен с Бога“ – т.е. с любовта?)
March 7, 2017
Divna knjiga. Jedna od onih koje čovjeku - na trenutak ili zauvijek, to poslije vidi - mijenjaju nutrinu. Ono što o sadržaju piše na koricama knjige ne samo premalo (naravno da je premalo, ne može biti drukčije), nego je pokušaj stavljanja njezinog sadržaja u nekakav "skraćeni opis" jednostavno nemoguć zadatak.
Reći ću samo ovo: prevoditelji nisu (nismo) samo ljudi koji prevode s jednog jezika na drugi. Nisu (nismo) samo oni koji drugima čine razumljivima tuđe riječi ili čak misli. Prevoditelji su - kao Daniel Stein - i ljudi koji spajaju riječi. Spajaju ljude. Kulture. Vjere. Duše. A takva je, kako sam ovdje osjetila, i Ljudmila Ulicka. Sretna sam i zahvalna da sam je otkrila i, nakon divnog "Daniela Steina", od kojeg se opraštam sa sjetom, s obnovljenom radošću u ruke uzimam njezinu sljedeću knjigu.
Reći ću samo ovo: prevoditelji nisu (nismo) samo ljudi koji prevode s jednog jezika na drugi. Nisu (nismo) samo oni koji drugima čine razumljivima tuđe riječi ili čak misli. Prevoditelji su - kao Daniel Stein - i ljudi koji spajaju riječi. Spajaju ljude. Kulture. Vjere. Duše. A takva je, kako sam ovdje osjetila, i Ljudmila Ulicka. Sretna sam i zahvalna da sam je otkrila i, nakon divnog "Daniela Steina", od kojeg se opraštam sa sjetom, s obnovljenom radošću u ruke uzimam njezinu sljedeću knjigu.
October 31, 2009
One of the most touchy and wise book in modern literature i read over last year. Book about person with Heart and one who was ready to share it irrespectively of religious, nations, past and current awful time and situation. About one who loved people so much that there is hope that hearts of those who met him can change - in reality (as meeting with one who was prototype of hero) - or hearts of readers...
October 4, 2018
Reading ‘Daniel Stein’ has taken me weeks, the stories it tells so painful and the telling itself requiring such concentration from the reader that I could only manage it in short bursts.
The scraps of information that come from multiple sources don’t make up a linear narrative so much as a slowly moving scroll of images telling stories of many characters, all connected in some way by Stein, the central figure. We see him through other people’s words, rarely through his own.
Ulinskaya includes a letter of her own to a friend at the end of each of the four sections, in which she talks about the difficulty she is having writing this major work. I shared her sense of exhaustion as I finished each section, gearing myself up for the next.
Now that I have finished it, I know that what I’m going to remember most vividly is Daniel’s life in Israel, and the effects of the religious hatreds he worked to overcome, as he preached in Hebrew the gospel of a Jewish Jesus, a rabbi, a teacher who taught the centrality of love. He denied the central Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which naturally got him into seriously hot water with the Catholic Church in which he was both monk and priest.
The theological debates were dense, but necessary to an understanding of Daniel’s increasingly impossible position within the Catholic Church, as well as a Christian in a militantly Jewish Israel, caught up in the Palestinian- Israeli conflicts.
The large cast of characters live in Russia, Poland, Germany, the United States and Italy (even the Pope of the day has an appearance) and in Israel.
The text is made up of letters between them, fragments of their memoirs, reports of sermons or talks that Daniel has given. The time frames move around. We see things in glimpses, then they’re gone again but all the time the long picture is being filled in, like tiny scenes in the background of a Chinese scroll.
Ulinskaya chose an incredibly complex and difficult means of telling this story - in fragments, with multiple voices and just as many perspectives - and somehow it seems just right for the subject matter.
The scraps of information that come from multiple sources don’t make up a linear narrative so much as a slowly moving scroll of images telling stories of many characters, all connected in some way by Stein, the central figure. We see him through other people’s words, rarely through his own.
Ulinskaya includes a letter of her own to a friend at the end of each of the four sections, in which she talks about the difficulty she is having writing this major work. I shared her sense of exhaustion as I finished each section, gearing myself up for the next.
Now that I have finished it, I know that what I’m going to remember most vividly is Daniel’s life in Israel, and the effects of the religious hatreds he worked to overcome, as he preached in Hebrew the gospel of a Jewish Jesus, a rabbi, a teacher who taught the centrality of love. He denied the central Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which naturally got him into seriously hot water with the Catholic Church in which he was both monk and priest.
The theological debates were dense, but necessary to an understanding of Daniel’s increasingly impossible position within the Catholic Church, as well as a Christian in a militantly Jewish Israel, caught up in the Palestinian- Israeli conflicts.
The large cast of characters live in Russia, Poland, Germany, the United States and Italy (even the Pope of the day has an appearance) and in Israel.
The text is made up of letters between them, fragments of their memoirs, reports of sermons or talks that Daniel has given. The time frames move around. We see things in glimpses, then they’re gone again but all the time the long picture is being filled in, like tiny scenes in the background of a Chinese scroll.
Ulinskaya chose an incredibly complex and difficult means of telling this story - in fragments, with multiple voices and just as many perspectives - and somehow it seems just right for the subject matter.
May 30, 2011
This was an exceptional read and I can't even tell why exactly.
Neither the topic of second world war nor the issues about faith, belief and god interest me much. It also isn't a story of which the end was unknown or which contained a tension arc. Still I could hardly put the book down and wanted to read on and on.
Because it is a wonderful book. Ulitskaya has a wonderful way of writing, she puts things into words, that make them seem simple, yet profound. It's a joy to read any of her books, but this one is even special, it has so many distinct voices in it. All the time while reading I kept wondering what it was that made me want to read on and on, I don't even cared much for the characters (as in "liked" them), yet I think it was exactly those voices and characters which Ulitskaya can bring to live so real and true, that made me want to read on and enjoy the book so much.
I only found, like to often with great books - why is that?, the end to be a bit rushed. And while all of the book seems very open ended and non-dogmatic, the end tarnishes this impression a tiny bit.
(And the translation is very good, it manages to keep something of the original Russian even in the German text.)
So I don't have much to say to recommend this book, still I feel like I want to urge every one I meet to read this book immediately.
So: Go read this book!
Neither the topic of second world war nor the issues about faith, belief and god interest me much. It also isn't a story of which the end was unknown or which contained a tension arc. Still I could hardly put the book down and wanted to read on and on.
Because it is a wonderful book. Ulitskaya has a wonderful way of writing, she puts things into words, that make them seem simple, yet profound. It's a joy to read any of her books, but this one is even special, it has so many distinct voices in it. All the time while reading I kept wondering what it was that made me want to read on and on, I don't even cared much for the characters (as in "liked" them), yet I think it was exactly those voices and characters which Ulitskaya can bring to live so real and true, that made me want to read on and enjoy the book so much.
I only found, like to often with great books - why is that?, the end to be a bit rushed. And while all of the book seems very open ended and non-dogmatic, the end tarnishes this impression a tiny bit.
(And the translation is very good, it manages to keep something of the original Russian even in the German text.)
So I don't have much to say to recommend this book, still I feel like I want to urge every one I meet to read this book immediately.
So: Go read this book!
July 24, 2022
Yowza. There are those books on faith that not only get me interested as someone with very little room for it myself, but actually go on to transfix me throughout. Daniel Stein is one of them; sits right alongside Jerusalem and The Books of Jacob in my little pantheon of Judeo-Christian heresies. As in all great novels of ideas, I'm not sure I always agree with the author or that she always agrees with her hero, but it's a power drill of a novel, using its dozens and dozens of narrators to lay bare and then contrast just how easy it is to be right and how hard it is to act right.
April 14, 2018
Улицка сама определя тази си творба – колаж от парченца от собствения си живот или живота на други хора без лепило – без връзки между тези парченца. Така умело пресъздава живота на една интересна, реално съществувала личност и на тези около нея. И покрай тези съдби има много философия, разсъждения върху юдаизма, християнството, религиите изобщо, етични категории. Не знам доколко е документалистика и доколко художествена литература – има и от едното, и от другото. Не знам кои от предадените документи, писма, лекции, изикуствоведческа статия, дори и проповед (с многобройно повтаряне на "Господи, помилуй!") са автентични или са измислени от нея. Но се е получило добре, звучи естествено. Когато авторката влиза в нечия чужда кожа (при Ева и Даниел със сигурност това е факт), тя го прави абсолютно убедително, възприема речника, който биха имали тези хора, маниерите, които биха били естествени за тях, читателят би могъл да ги различи дори без да прочете имената им. Няма да скрия, че въодушевлението, което ме беше обзело в началото, леко поутихна към края. Книгата е дълга, а и е изморително това непрекъснато скачане от една форма на друга – например от лично писмо на чиновнически доклад или записана лекция и т.н. Но е интересно, не ми доскуча. Изненадах се, че следващата книга, каято зачетох – "Пламтящият свят" на Сири Хусквет, използва същата форма на повествовавие. Най-малкото ще мога да ги сравня.
January 30, 2021
Niekoľko týždňov po prečítaní sa mi v hlave akosi zcelil a uležal celý príbeh. Zostal mi z neho nejaký pocit, atmosféra, spojená s postavou Daniela Steina, charizmatického, dobrosrdečného človeka, ktorý iným ide príkladom svojím ´malým, osobným kresťanstvom´, v ktorom záleží najmä na tom, byť dobrým človekom. Ináč sa mi kniha pomerne ťažko čitala, jednak kvôli formátu listového románu poskladaného z fragmentov listov, denníkových zápiskov, rôznych dokumentov, častí kázaní a prednášok, a jednak aj témou, v ktorej centre bola viera a kde celé pasáže prekáračiek, náboženskej histórie a opisov schiziem mi prišli veľmi nezáživné a nudné. Kniha má ale zároveň aj veľa múdrosti a zaujímavých náhľadov napríklad na vojnu, židovstvo, ľudskú povahu, a preto stojí za prečítanie.
May 19, 2017
Kao i prethodni njeni romani ovo je roman pojedinca. Likovi su nesavrseni, ophrvani sopstvenim problemima, brigama i prosloscu. Radnja se desava na istorijskom i geografski skroz problematicnim mestima. Od II svetskog rata do stvaranja drzave Izrael. Holokaust, odnos prema arapskim hriscanima, odnos između religija, Izrael.. sve se to preplice u ovoj knjizi.
June 15, 2014
Oh my. What a sobering and remarkable book this is. It both horrified me to see the naked inhumanity of our humanity, and forced self introspection as to the relevance of my own life. In the book Americans are described as being one-dimensional, and I can totally see that compared to the life of Daniel Rufeisen. I loved the religious/spiritual threads in the narrative.
The only challenging part of this book was keeping track of all of the characters and how they fit in with each other.
Quotes that spoke to me:
"In the first place, all the vacancies in my heart had already been used up by people who were dead. In the second place, here in America there are many worthy people but their experience of life is extremely limited and that makes them rather flat and cardboard creatures."
"I have managed to take a few of steps in the direction of freedom, but one thing I most certainly have been unable to overcome or to free myself from is my national origins. I have not managed to stop being a Jew. Being Jewish is something intrusive and final like the accursed hump of a hunchback and is also a beautiful gift. It dictates ones logic and way of thinking, fetters and unfolds us. It is as irrevocable as gender. Jewishness restricts your freedom......Jewishness is unquestionably broader than Judaism."
"The war did dreadful things to people. Even if they survived physically, it crippled their souls. Some became cruel, some cowardly, some barricaed themselves behind a stone wall from God and the world."
"I know even more about death than I do women, and again it is through the war. There is nothing more vile and unnatural in this world than war. How it perverts not only life but even death. Death in a war is bloody, full of animal fear, always violent...but suicide, Wladek, suicide! The soul itself repudiating its existence, extroverted people rarely resort to this act. They are able to find a way of projecting their suffering outward, sharing it with somebody, distancing themselves from it."
"He knew nothing about me, but intuited everything. He was an emotional genius. He approached me so cautiously, as if I were a spirit or a mirage."
"The sad truth is that I cannot free my head of all the accusations I have been storing up against my mother all through my life. I have long ceased to experience the fury and indignation she used to make me feel when I was young. I feel infinitely sorry for her. She lies there pale and dry, like a shriveled wasp, and her eyes are like headlamps, full of energy. But, Lord have mercy on us, what kind of energy is it? Distilled, concentrated hatred. Hatred of evil! She hates evil with such passion and fury that evil can rest assured. People like her make evil immortal."
I am copying a most excellent Summmary review of this book by Subhash Jaireth.
"In August 1992, Daniel (Oswald) Rufeisen, a Jewish pastor at the Stella Maris Carmelite Monastery in Hafia, visited Moscow on his way to a reunion of inmates of the Jewish Ghetto at Mir (Dzyatlava) near Minsk, the capital of Belarus. In Moscow he met Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya and her friends. At this informal meeting he spoke about his life and replied to questions from the audience. ‘Luckily someone in the room,’ recalls Ulitskaya, ‘turned on the tape recorder.’ This brief encounter convinced Ulitskaya to write the life-story of this remarkable man, a pravednik (a holy man) in her words.
As she began researching for the novel she came across biographies of Rufeisin by Nechama Tech (In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisin, Oxford University Press, 1992) and by Dieter Corbach (Daniel, der Mann aus der Lowengrube: Aus dem Leben von Daniel Oswald Rufeisen, Scriba, 1993). These biographies and other brief accounts of Rufeisen’s eventful life seemed to Ulitskaya ‘inadequate’ and she decided to write the story herself. She spent some time in Israel in the mid nineties, visiting places and talking to people. Rufeisen wasn’t alive anymore; he died in the summer of 1998. Ulitskaya finished her book in 2006. It was published in Russia the same year and received the Russian National Literary Prize in 2007. The English translation was published in 2011 with the title Daniel Stein, Interpreter: A Novel. It is translated by Arch Tait who had in 2010 received the 2010 English PEN Literature in Translation award for Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia.
Daniel Rufeisen was a German-speaking Polish Jew. During the Nazi occupation of Poland he managed to escape to the Jewish Ghetto at Mir and worked with the Gestapo and local police as an interpreter and helped three hundred Jews flee the ghetto. Escaping from the Gestapo he was forced to take refuge in a Catholic convent, where he decided to convert to Catholicism. After the war he migrated to Israel where he founded a Jewish Christian Church in Hafia.
Daniel Stein, Interpreter is Ulitskaya’s eighth novel. She won the Prix Medicis award for Sonchka in 1996 and the Russian Booker Prize for Kukotsky Case in 2011.
I first read Daniel Stein, Interpreter in Russian, downloaded as an eBook from a Russian website. I have recently read the English translation and I am truly impressed by it; the original voice of Ulitskaya has been conveyed without any loss or distortion.
There isn’t any doubt that Ulitskaya wanted to write the story of Daniel Rufeisen; she felt morally and emotionally compelled. This urgency to tell the story is reflected in the style and structure of the book. The Russian title doesn’t call the book a novel. However the English translation describes it either as a ‘novel’ or a ‘novel in documents’. The prose is minimalistic: brief and precise sentences help to maintain the pace of narration and assist the author to tell the story ‘directly’, without unnecessary diversions. The temptation to lace the text with metaphors and lengthy descriptions of landscape (interior or exterior) is avoided. This simplicity reinforces the power of story-telling.
The novel is divided into five sections. The heading of each chapter is precise (for instance, 1995, Hebron, Police Station or August 1992, On the Flight Frankfurt-Boston), and this anchors it firmly to the time and space of the story. Most of the novel is told in the first-person voice of a narrator. Only in a few chapters of the final section which describe the death of Daniel Stein in a car accident does the voice change to that of third-person.
‘I am not a real writer,’ notes Ulitskaya in the novel, ‘and this book is not a novel (Russian word roman), but a collage. With a pair of scissors I have cut out fragments of my own life and of the life of others and pasted them together as if without glue and stitch marks: a living story written on fragments of time.’ In my view the novel is not a collage but a ‘cinematic montage’ of narrative fragments, a technique pioneered many years ago by Russian cinematographer Sergei Eisnestein. This fascinating montage/collage of ‘documents’ includes letters (sometimes only fragments), diary entries, newspaper reports and articles, telegrams, tourist brochures, sermons, transcripts of police interrogations, records of conversations, tutorial notes, KGB files, and various secret reports and complaints. Most intriguing however are the letters of Ulitskaya addressed to her editor Elena Kostyukovich. These letters, appearing at the end or beginning of each of the five sections, work as a framing device for the whole book revealing the author’s implied intentions.
The voice of the ‘real’ Daniel Rufeisen or his fictionalized twin Daniel Stein is heard and read in number of different ways. They consists of ‘extracts of Daniel Stein’s conversations with students in Freiburg, his conversations with Hilda, his German assistant, and his direct first-person narration of events.
In a Paris Review interview, Portuguese Noble Laureate Jose Saramago mentions that almost all novelists dream that one of their characters will one day become ‘somebody’ i.e., someone perceived by readers as a ‘real’ person. Ulitsakaya doesn’t face this problem. She begins with a historically real person (Daniel Rufeisen) and creates through and around him a fictionalized Daniel Stein, who at times appears even more ‘real’ than Daniel Rufeisen.
This technique of using historically real characters and/or events to create fictional narratives isn’t new. Julian Barnes did this with Flaubert in Flaubert’s Parrot. However my favourite is definitely David Malouf’s Ovid in An Imaginary Life. His Hector, Priam and Achilles in Ransom are equally impressive. In my book of three monologues To Silence, I have used a similar technique to tell the story of Kabir (1140-1518), Maria Chekhova (1863-1957) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639). I call my stories ‘fictional autobiographies’. In writing these monologues I felt as if I was performing the role of my principal protagonists. However my little book pales in comparison with Ulitskaya’s monumental act of story-telling. Her novel represents an extraordinary feat of a writer’s creative imagination, in which historically real people and events are skillfully intertwined with imagined events and characters. She has in a way created a whole constellation, the center of which is Daniel Stein, orbited by a galaxy of stars and planets illuminating each other. Their relationship is of codependence and need each other’s presence to tell the story.
One of my favourite Russian philosophers and literary critics is Mikhail Bakhtin. He is famous for developing the notion of dialogism. According to him, I, as a person, always need the presence of the other to know who I really am. This is because I suffer from a ‘deficiency of vision’ which can only be compensated by a friendly or not so friendly ‘excess’ which the other possesses with respect to me. In Ulitskaya’s novel I spot a similar process of dialogic imagination, where the character of Daniel Stein is created though words and utterances of other characters. She uses their voices and actions to map the life of the fictional Daniel Stein.
Amongst the constellation of many partially or fully imagined characters I find Hilda Engel one of the most intriguing. We are told that Hilda’s grandfather was a Nazi General and a prominent member of the Party. Her father, a German soldier, perished in one of the battles at the Eastern Front in 1944. As a fourteen-year old girl she got the chance to read the diary of Anne Frank and came to know about the holocaust which forced her to question the silence, inaction and even participation of her own family members in the genocide of the Jews. She decides to go to Israel and dedicate her life helping the Jews. In Israel she meets Daniel Stein and becomes his assistant helping him run the Carmelite church in Hafia.
In one of her letters to Elena Kostyukovich Ulitskaya confesses that the character of Hilda Engel is based on a real German woman. But this real ‘angel’ of a woman didn’t go to Israel to help Daniel Stein but left Germany after the war to work in a Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia. I guess many characters in Ulitskaya’s novel have similar origins. Real or not real they are highly believable.
Ulitskaya makes her Hilda go to Israel to atone for the sins of her Nazi family members. Israel thus becomes the land of promise and redemption where people who have lost hope can go to redeem themselves. Israel isn’t only the promised homeland of the Jews but also the land of pristine, original and thereby true Jewish Christianity. That is why Daniel Stein decides to establish his own small Carmelite Church where he delivers his sermons in Hebrew. The attraction of this land is so overwhelming that even Rita Kowacz, a Jewish ex-partisan and a member of the communist party, who was banished to Stalin’s Gulag after the War, decides to spend the final years of her life in Israel where she too converts to Christianity.
In representing Israel as the land of promise and hope the novel, however, fails to engage in an empathetic way with the story of dispossessed Muslim Palestinians. There are endearing depictions of Palestinian Christian Arabs such as Musa, the botanist, with whom Hilda has a brief affair, however Muslim Palestinians remain unspoken and unheard. Only one event, the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of twenty-nine Palestinian Muslim worshipers in Hebron, allows them entry in the story.
The unblemished and wholly saintly Daniel Stein too shows a few blind spots. One is revealed in a letter of Eva Mankuyan (the estranged daughter of Rita Kowacz) to her friend Esther Gantman. Eva is disturbed that her only son is gay. She discusses her son’s ‘predicament’ with Daniel Stein, who tells her that he found women so incredibly beautiful that it was beyond him to understand why some men decide to overlook them. He advises her to ask her son Alex to move out of her home so as to preserve herself from destruction.
These chilling words had a double effect on me. On the one hand it underlined the anti-gay position of the Catholic Church, but it also made Daniel Stein appear more human and hence fallible. Suddenly I began to see more holes and cracks in the solid, almost saintly, figure of this man.
The fact that I have read this novel both in Russian and English and have decided to write about it confirms that I find the novel compelling. Its overall ‘message’ and the ‘story’ are simple and yet its narrative expanse (what Bakhtin calls the Big Time of a novel) is unbelievably large. The moral and emotional urgency with which it has been conceived and written adds power to the narrative.
In his essay Epic and the Novel, Bakhtin calls the novel as the ‘… leading hero in the drama of literary development,’ of our time. This is because it ‘… best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in making.’ The novel as a genre of story telling will never perish because it will always find new ways of being and becoming. In my view Ulitskaya has created a novel which underlines this ever-changing, ever-becoming nature of the novel. As a writer this is what impresses me most. It opens new possibilities of story-telling.
Readers who cherish the art of slow-reading would love this book. It is simple to read, and if needed can be read in a few sittings, but it does force one to think about the world in which we live and the world in which this incredible book has come into being."
The only challenging part of this book was keeping track of all of the characters and how they fit in with each other.
Quotes that spoke to me:
"In the first place, all the vacancies in my heart had already been used up by people who were dead. In the second place, here in America there are many worthy people but their experience of life is extremely limited and that makes them rather flat and cardboard creatures."
"I have managed to take a few of steps in the direction of freedom, but one thing I most certainly have been unable to overcome or to free myself from is my national origins. I have not managed to stop being a Jew. Being Jewish is something intrusive and final like the accursed hump of a hunchback and is also a beautiful gift. It dictates ones logic and way of thinking, fetters and unfolds us. It is as irrevocable as gender. Jewishness restricts your freedom......Jewishness is unquestionably broader than Judaism."
"The war did dreadful things to people. Even if they survived physically, it crippled their souls. Some became cruel, some cowardly, some barricaed themselves behind a stone wall from God and the world."
"I know even more about death than I do women, and again it is through the war. There is nothing more vile and unnatural in this world than war. How it perverts not only life but even death. Death in a war is bloody, full of animal fear, always violent...but suicide, Wladek, suicide! The soul itself repudiating its existence, extroverted people rarely resort to this act. They are able to find a way of projecting their suffering outward, sharing it with somebody, distancing themselves from it."
"He knew nothing about me, but intuited everything. He was an emotional genius. He approached me so cautiously, as if I were a spirit or a mirage."
"The sad truth is that I cannot free my head of all the accusations I have been storing up against my mother all through my life. I have long ceased to experience the fury and indignation she used to make me feel when I was young. I feel infinitely sorry for her. She lies there pale and dry, like a shriveled wasp, and her eyes are like headlamps, full of energy. But, Lord have mercy on us, what kind of energy is it? Distilled, concentrated hatred. Hatred of evil! She hates evil with such passion and fury that evil can rest assured. People like her make evil immortal."
I am copying a most excellent Summmary review of this book by Subhash Jaireth.
"In August 1992, Daniel (Oswald) Rufeisen, a Jewish pastor at the Stella Maris Carmelite Monastery in Hafia, visited Moscow on his way to a reunion of inmates of the Jewish Ghetto at Mir (Dzyatlava) near Minsk, the capital of Belarus. In Moscow he met Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya and her friends. At this informal meeting he spoke about his life and replied to questions from the audience. ‘Luckily someone in the room,’ recalls Ulitskaya, ‘turned on the tape recorder.’ This brief encounter convinced Ulitskaya to write the life-story of this remarkable man, a pravednik (a holy man) in her words.
As she began researching for the novel she came across biographies of Rufeisin by Nechama Tech (In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisin, Oxford University Press, 1992) and by Dieter Corbach (Daniel, der Mann aus der Lowengrube: Aus dem Leben von Daniel Oswald Rufeisen, Scriba, 1993). These biographies and other brief accounts of Rufeisen’s eventful life seemed to Ulitskaya ‘inadequate’ and she decided to write the story herself. She spent some time in Israel in the mid nineties, visiting places and talking to people. Rufeisen wasn’t alive anymore; he died in the summer of 1998. Ulitskaya finished her book in 2006. It was published in Russia the same year and received the Russian National Literary Prize in 2007. The English translation was published in 2011 with the title Daniel Stein, Interpreter: A Novel. It is translated by Arch Tait who had in 2010 received the 2010 English PEN Literature in Translation award for Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia.
Daniel Rufeisen was a German-speaking Polish Jew. During the Nazi occupation of Poland he managed to escape to the Jewish Ghetto at Mir and worked with the Gestapo and local police as an interpreter and helped three hundred Jews flee the ghetto. Escaping from the Gestapo he was forced to take refuge in a Catholic convent, where he decided to convert to Catholicism. After the war he migrated to Israel where he founded a Jewish Christian Church in Hafia.
Daniel Stein, Interpreter is Ulitskaya’s eighth novel. She won the Prix Medicis award for Sonchka in 1996 and the Russian Booker Prize for Kukotsky Case in 2011.
I first read Daniel Stein, Interpreter in Russian, downloaded as an eBook from a Russian website. I have recently read the English translation and I am truly impressed by it; the original voice of Ulitskaya has been conveyed without any loss or distortion.
There isn’t any doubt that Ulitskaya wanted to write the story of Daniel Rufeisen; she felt morally and emotionally compelled. This urgency to tell the story is reflected in the style and structure of the book. The Russian title doesn’t call the book a novel. However the English translation describes it either as a ‘novel’ or a ‘novel in documents’. The prose is minimalistic: brief and precise sentences help to maintain the pace of narration and assist the author to tell the story ‘directly’, without unnecessary diversions. The temptation to lace the text with metaphors and lengthy descriptions of landscape (interior or exterior) is avoided. This simplicity reinforces the power of story-telling.
The novel is divided into five sections. The heading of each chapter is precise (for instance, 1995, Hebron, Police Station or August 1992, On the Flight Frankfurt-Boston), and this anchors it firmly to the time and space of the story. Most of the novel is told in the first-person voice of a narrator. Only in a few chapters of the final section which describe the death of Daniel Stein in a car accident does the voice change to that of third-person.
‘I am not a real writer,’ notes Ulitskaya in the novel, ‘and this book is not a novel (Russian word roman), but a collage. With a pair of scissors I have cut out fragments of my own life and of the life of others and pasted them together as if without glue and stitch marks: a living story written on fragments of time.’ In my view the novel is not a collage but a ‘cinematic montage’ of narrative fragments, a technique pioneered many years ago by Russian cinematographer Sergei Eisnestein. This fascinating montage/collage of ‘documents’ includes letters (sometimes only fragments), diary entries, newspaper reports and articles, telegrams, tourist brochures, sermons, transcripts of police interrogations, records of conversations, tutorial notes, KGB files, and various secret reports and complaints. Most intriguing however are the letters of Ulitskaya addressed to her editor Elena Kostyukovich. These letters, appearing at the end or beginning of each of the five sections, work as a framing device for the whole book revealing the author’s implied intentions.
The voice of the ‘real’ Daniel Rufeisen or his fictionalized twin Daniel Stein is heard and read in number of different ways. They consists of ‘extracts of Daniel Stein’s conversations with students in Freiburg, his conversations with Hilda, his German assistant, and his direct first-person narration of events.
In a Paris Review interview, Portuguese Noble Laureate Jose Saramago mentions that almost all novelists dream that one of their characters will one day become ‘somebody’ i.e., someone perceived by readers as a ‘real’ person. Ulitsakaya doesn’t face this problem. She begins with a historically real person (Daniel Rufeisen) and creates through and around him a fictionalized Daniel Stein, who at times appears even more ‘real’ than Daniel Rufeisen.
This technique of using historically real characters and/or events to create fictional narratives isn’t new. Julian Barnes did this with Flaubert in Flaubert’s Parrot. However my favourite is definitely David Malouf’s Ovid in An Imaginary Life. His Hector, Priam and Achilles in Ransom are equally impressive. In my book of three monologues To Silence, I have used a similar technique to tell the story of Kabir (1140-1518), Maria Chekhova (1863-1957) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639). I call my stories ‘fictional autobiographies’. In writing these monologues I felt as if I was performing the role of my principal protagonists. However my little book pales in comparison with Ulitskaya’s monumental act of story-telling. Her novel represents an extraordinary feat of a writer’s creative imagination, in which historically real people and events are skillfully intertwined with imagined events and characters. She has in a way created a whole constellation, the center of which is Daniel Stein, orbited by a galaxy of stars and planets illuminating each other. Their relationship is of codependence and need each other’s presence to tell the story.
One of my favourite Russian philosophers and literary critics is Mikhail Bakhtin. He is famous for developing the notion of dialogism. According to him, I, as a person, always need the presence of the other to know who I really am. This is because I suffer from a ‘deficiency of vision’ which can only be compensated by a friendly or not so friendly ‘excess’ which the other possesses with respect to me. In Ulitskaya’s novel I spot a similar process of dialogic imagination, where the character of Daniel Stein is created though words and utterances of other characters. She uses their voices and actions to map the life of the fictional Daniel Stein.
Amongst the constellation of many partially or fully imagined characters I find Hilda Engel one of the most intriguing. We are told that Hilda’s grandfather was a Nazi General and a prominent member of the Party. Her father, a German soldier, perished in one of the battles at the Eastern Front in 1944. As a fourteen-year old girl she got the chance to read the diary of Anne Frank and came to know about the holocaust which forced her to question the silence, inaction and even participation of her own family members in the genocide of the Jews. She decides to go to Israel and dedicate her life helping the Jews. In Israel she meets Daniel Stein and becomes his assistant helping him run the Carmelite church in Hafia.
In one of her letters to Elena Kostyukovich Ulitskaya confesses that the character of Hilda Engel is based on a real German woman. But this real ‘angel’ of a woman didn’t go to Israel to help Daniel Stein but left Germany after the war to work in a Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia. I guess many characters in Ulitskaya’s novel have similar origins. Real or not real they are highly believable.
Ulitskaya makes her Hilda go to Israel to atone for the sins of her Nazi family members. Israel thus becomes the land of promise and redemption where people who have lost hope can go to redeem themselves. Israel isn’t only the promised homeland of the Jews but also the land of pristine, original and thereby true Jewish Christianity. That is why Daniel Stein decides to establish his own small Carmelite Church where he delivers his sermons in Hebrew. The attraction of this land is so overwhelming that even Rita Kowacz, a Jewish ex-partisan and a member of the communist party, who was banished to Stalin’s Gulag after the War, decides to spend the final years of her life in Israel where she too converts to Christianity.
In representing Israel as the land of promise and hope the novel, however, fails to engage in an empathetic way with the story of dispossessed Muslim Palestinians. There are endearing depictions of Palestinian Christian Arabs such as Musa, the botanist, with whom Hilda has a brief affair, however Muslim Palestinians remain unspoken and unheard. Only one event, the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of twenty-nine Palestinian Muslim worshipers in Hebron, allows them entry in the story.
The unblemished and wholly saintly Daniel Stein too shows a few blind spots. One is revealed in a letter of Eva Mankuyan (the estranged daughter of Rita Kowacz) to her friend Esther Gantman. Eva is disturbed that her only son is gay. She discusses her son’s ‘predicament’ with Daniel Stein, who tells her that he found women so incredibly beautiful that it was beyond him to understand why some men decide to overlook them. He advises her to ask her son Alex to move out of her home so as to preserve herself from destruction.
These chilling words had a double effect on me. On the one hand it underlined the anti-gay position of the Catholic Church, but it also made Daniel Stein appear more human and hence fallible. Suddenly I began to see more holes and cracks in the solid, almost saintly, figure of this man.
The fact that I have read this novel both in Russian and English and have decided to write about it confirms that I find the novel compelling. Its overall ‘message’ and the ‘story’ are simple and yet its narrative expanse (what Bakhtin calls the Big Time of a novel) is unbelievably large. The moral and emotional urgency with which it has been conceived and written adds power to the narrative.
In his essay Epic and the Novel, Bakhtin calls the novel as the ‘… leading hero in the drama of literary development,’ of our time. This is because it ‘… best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in making.’ The novel as a genre of story telling will never perish because it will always find new ways of being and becoming. In my view Ulitskaya has created a novel which underlines this ever-changing, ever-becoming nature of the novel. As a writer this is what impresses me most. It opens new possibilities of story-telling.
Readers who cherish the art of slow-reading would love this book. It is simple to read, and if needed can be read in a few sittings, but it does force one to think about the world in which we live and the world in which this incredible book has come into being."
May 14, 2011
This was one of those novels where I could almost hear the sound of my brain and awareness being stretched and expanded as I read. It is clear from the prologue and from letters to her editor within the work itself that Lyudmila Ulitskaya was incredibly taken with the real-life hero Brother Daniel (Oswald Rufeisen) and wrote this novel as a way to understand him and make him understandable to others.
She does this through a collage of 170 fictional conversations, lectures, sermons, letters, diaries, and news articles. Daniel Stein (based on Oswald Rufeisen) is a Polish Jew who translates and interprets for the Gestapo. In this role he is able to save many Jewish lives before being discovered. He then hides with a group of Catholic nuns, converts to Catholicism, and becomes a Carmelite monk. When he applies for Israeli citizenship he is rejected on the grounds that he had converted to Christianity. He takes his case to the Supreme Court; the court upholds the government’s decision; Daniel then takes the longer route of becoming a citizen through naturalization. He spends the rest of his life trying to create a community modeled on the Church of St. James, the first Christian church in Jerusalem before the big split between Judaism and Christianity.
Those are the facts of the novel, but its heart has to do with what Lyudmila writes in the prologue about Brother Daniel: “This book is devoted to a man who tried all his life to break down the wall of misunderstanding.” All his life, in a very large sense, he worked as an interpreter, interpreting what it means to believe in God -- “I recognize that language is not that important. All that really matters is what the language is expressing” -- and translating that into a life that brought understanding and reconciliation to those around him.
There is a section towards the end where Lyudmila writes to her editor about a dream she has, a troubled dream where she is searching for something. It has to do with the end of Daniel’s life: “Daniel was a righteous man. In human terms he suffered defeat. After his death his congregation dispersed and now, just as before, there is no Church of St. James. In a sense, Jesus, too, suffered defeat. First he was not understood or accepted by his own people, then he was accepted by many other peoples but still not understood. If anyone wants to argue that he was understood, where is that new human being, that new history, those new relations between people?”
She concludes: “None of my questions have been answered. I have had finally to abandon the cozy clichés I found useful in my life … What does the Lord want? Obedience? Cooperation? Mutual destruction of the peoples? I have completely repudiated value judgments. I’m not up to them. In my heart I feel I lived an important lesson with Daniel, but when I try to define it, I recognize that what you believe doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you personally behave.”
I’m sure there are many strands I did not grasp on this first reading. The experience felt much like holding a rubics cube-like puzzle of religious/theological/what-it-means-to-be-moral questions and twisting it this way and that as one read through the collage of voices coloring in the life of Daniel. The lives of certain people are like windows through which we get a glimpse of the transcendent. The life of Brother Daniel is one of those, and I am so glad that I read this magnificent novel.
She does this through a collage of 170 fictional conversations, lectures, sermons, letters, diaries, and news articles. Daniel Stein (based on Oswald Rufeisen) is a Polish Jew who translates and interprets for the Gestapo. In this role he is able to save many Jewish lives before being discovered. He then hides with a group of Catholic nuns, converts to Catholicism, and becomes a Carmelite monk. When he applies for Israeli citizenship he is rejected on the grounds that he had converted to Christianity. He takes his case to the Supreme Court; the court upholds the government’s decision; Daniel then takes the longer route of becoming a citizen through naturalization. He spends the rest of his life trying to create a community modeled on the Church of St. James, the first Christian church in Jerusalem before the big split between Judaism and Christianity.
Those are the facts of the novel, but its heart has to do with what Lyudmila writes in the prologue about Brother Daniel: “This book is devoted to a man who tried all his life to break down the wall of misunderstanding.” All his life, in a very large sense, he worked as an interpreter, interpreting what it means to believe in God -- “I recognize that language is not that important. All that really matters is what the language is expressing” -- and translating that into a life that brought understanding and reconciliation to those around him.
There is a section towards the end where Lyudmila writes to her editor about a dream she has, a troubled dream where she is searching for something. It has to do with the end of Daniel’s life: “Daniel was a righteous man. In human terms he suffered defeat. After his death his congregation dispersed and now, just as before, there is no Church of St. James. In a sense, Jesus, too, suffered defeat. First he was not understood or accepted by his own people, then he was accepted by many other peoples but still not understood. If anyone wants to argue that he was understood, where is that new human being, that new history, those new relations between people?”
She concludes: “None of my questions have been answered. I have had finally to abandon the cozy clichés I found useful in my life … What does the Lord want? Obedience? Cooperation? Mutual destruction of the peoples? I have completely repudiated value judgments. I’m not up to them. In my heart I feel I lived an important lesson with Daniel, but when I try to define it, I recognize that what you believe doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you personally behave.”
I’m sure there are many strands I did not grasp on this first reading. The experience felt much like holding a rubics cube-like puzzle of religious/theological/what-it-means-to-be-moral questions and twisting it this way and that as one read through the collage of voices coloring in the life of Daniel. The lives of certain people are like windows through which we get a glimpse of the transcendent. The life of Brother Daniel is one of those, and I am so glad that I read this magnificent novel.
July 7, 2013
Для меня это не читалось как книга о судьбе евреев по всему миру и во все времена, хотя кто-то возможно и воспримет книгу именно так, даже в какой-то мере познавательно-образовательно, видно, что переработано много источников, много интервью, много мысли. Не навязчиво, нравоучительно, а как-то будто со стороны, даже где-то изумленно.
Но я восприняла это именно так, как говорится о жизни самого Даниэля - "О ценности жизни, которая обращена в слякоть под ногами, о свободе, которая мало кому нужна, о Боге, которого чем дальше, тем больше нет в нашей жизни, об усилиях по выковариванию Бога из обветшавших слов, из всего этого церковного мусора и самой на себя замкнувшейся жизни"
И главная идея, мне кажется, в том, что в борьбе между религиями, чей Бог выше и "правее", какая церковь праведнее, мы забываем искать Бога в себе, своих поступках. И совершенно, как мы Его называем - Бог, Аллах, Будда... Высшая ценность жизни гораздо огромнее этих разделений. И эта огромность раскрывается в жизни одного маленького человека.
Нить повествования гипнотизирует, совершенно нет ничего противоестественного в этих "перескоках" от одного героя к другому, от первого лица к третьему... Как-то все очень естественно, и затягивает, задерживает внимание.
Ощущается огромная работа, и в то же время чудная легкость повествования, так что даже в отпуске чудесно читается.
Но я восприняла это именно так, как говорится о жизни самого Даниэля - "О ценности жизни, которая обращена в слякоть под ногами, о свободе, которая мало кому нужна, о Боге, которого чем дальше, тем больше нет в нашей жизни, об усилиях по выковариванию Бога из обветшавших слов, из всего этого церковного мусора и самой на себя замкнувшейся жизни"
И главная идея, мне кажется, в том, что в борьбе между религиями, чей Бог выше и "правее", какая церковь праведнее, мы забываем искать Бога в себе, своих поступках. И совершенно, как мы Его называем - Бог, Аллах, Будда... Высшая ценность жизни гораздо огромнее этих разделений. И эта огромность раскрывается в жизни одного маленького человека.
Нить повествования гипнотизирует, совершенно нет ничего противоестественного в этих "перескоках" от одного героя к другому, от первого лица к третьему... Как-то все очень естественно, и затягивает, задерживает внимание.
Ощущается огромная работа, и в то же время чудная легкость повествования, так что даже в отпуске чудесно читается.
March 4, 2019
Отказвам се. Красивият стил на Улицка няма да ме накара да я допрочета, а стилът и определено е на висота!
Усеща се стремежът на писателката това да е нейният Голям Роман. Епистоларният подход е интересен - но дотам. Книгата изглежда съставена от несвързани и някак разхвърляни вестникарски изрезки със сензационно съдържание. Ционизмът, комунизмът, войните (поне няколко - на Израел плюс ВСВ), желанието за осмисляне на тоя луд свят независимо от религия и култура определено са здраво заложени. Но героите не са нищо повече от безлични и неясни сенки, събитията са твърде разпокъсани и на парче. Поне половината от тези герои са ненужни за сюжета. Направо скука - не вярвах, че ще го кажа за тази авторка, но факт.
Усеща се стремежът на писателката това да е нейният Голям Роман. Епистоларният подход е интересен - но дотам. Книгата изглежда съставена от несвързани и някак разхвърляни вестникарски изрезки със сензационно съдържание. Ционизмът, комунизмът, войните (поне няколко - на Израел плюс ВСВ), желанието за осмисляне на тоя луд свят независимо от религия и култура определено са здраво заложени. Но героите не са нищо повече от безлични и неясни сенки, събитията са твърде разпокъсани и на парче. Поне половината от тези герои са ненужни за сюжета. Направо скука - не вярвах, че ще го кажа за тази авторка, но факт.
January 2, 2023
Roman o životu Daniela Steina koji je autorica rekonstruirala služeći se dijelovima dokumenata i velikog broja pisama. Daniel Stein je bio Židov i katolički svećenik, pripadnik reda karmelićana koji je za vrijeme II. Svjetskog rata igrom slučaja radio kao prevoditelj za Gestapo, što je iskoristio da bi pomagao u spašavanju Židova. Čak i kad je znao da pomaganje drugima ugrožava njegov vlastiti život, nije odustajao od svog puta. Kroz pisma raznih ljudi, može se lijepo rekonstruirati na koji ih je način dotakla Danielova beskrajna dobrota, ona iskrena, svetačka dobrota i tolerancija. Fascinantan karakter. Olovna vremena iz nekih ljudi izvuku ono najgore, a iz drugih ono najbolje.
August 5, 2013
For me, it is first of all a book about uprootedness: Jews as "collective Job", Christian Arabs, Jewish Christians, Orthodox Catholics with inclination for Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholics converting to Orthodox Catholicism. A typical example: Roman Catholic nun, half Polish, half Lithuanian, with background in Russia, converting to Orthodox Catholicism, marrying an Orthodox Catholic Jew and moving to Israel.
The novel consists of fragments of letters, diary notes, interviews, newspaper articles and other documents connected by figure of Daniel Stein, Polish Jew who survived Nazi occupation, became Catholic priest, settled in Haifa and tried to renew Judeo-Christian community. The author is troubled with one big question: Why do all the main problems constantly revolve around Jews? And how can be this question cancelled? Of course, it is hard to answer, after all, we had to resolve the mystery of history at first. But Daniel Stein surprisingly manages to reconceal by his life all these seemingly irreconcilable religious, social and ethnic conflicts.
The book has some weak spots: Almost all characters use the same means of expression. Due to the documentary style I was missing the feeling of autonomy that stems from immersion into classical narration. Instead, you see how the author selects and presents stuff and occassionaly I felt being pushed into her own conclusions. The ethical idea, as some reviewers noted, may seem rather trivial.
Anyway, it was extremely interesting read, especially because it portrays Israel from unusual, perhaps marginal perspectives. Without this (and without my affection for this land) my rating could be still more reserved.
The novel consists of fragments of letters, diary notes, interviews, newspaper articles and other documents connected by figure of Daniel Stein, Polish Jew who survived Nazi occupation, became Catholic priest, settled in Haifa and tried to renew Judeo-Christian community. The author is troubled with one big question: Why do all the main problems constantly revolve around Jews? And how can be this question cancelled? Of course, it is hard to answer, after all, we had to resolve the mystery of history at first. But Daniel Stein surprisingly manages to reconceal by his life all these seemingly irreconcilable religious, social and ethnic conflicts.
The book has some weak spots: Almost all characters use the same means of expression. Due to the documentary style I was missing the feeling of autonomy that stems from immersion into classical narration. Instead, you see how the author selects and presents stuff and occassionaly I felt being pushed into her own conclusions. The ethical idea, as some reviewers noted, may seem rather trivial.
Anyway, it was extremely interesting read, especially because it portrays Israel from unusual, perhaps marginal perspectives. Without this (and without my affection for this land) my rating could be still more reserved.
October 29, 2020
Reading this felt similar to reading Brothers Karamazov, so much of their meaning and purpose revolves around religion and faith.
I simply do not have a religious bone in my body and my personal connection with Christianity is just a frail cultural one.
But books like this almost make me wish I had any kind of faith to be able to connect more to these feelings and reasoning behind them. This is a gorgeous novel: we see fragments of peoples lives, mostly through their letters, loosely interconnected. We see them dealing with their faith, their identity. We get introduced to religious history and theory. And connecting it all, slowly unfolding through the many narratives, diaries, conversations, news articles, there is the portait of Daniel - Ulitskaya's idea of a true holy man. She nearly convinced me. I wanted her to convince me.
Reading Ulitskaya you would think religion is a basic need of a person, that without it you're empty, like we all carry some God-shaped hole in our souls and the difference is only that some of us, as Daniel says towards the end of the book, choose to fill up that hole with other things: communism, fascism, vegetarianism or aliens..
I can't make sense of that. I do not have the personal connection to this lovely novel that I wish I had. But then, why else would you read books if not to be confronted with world views other than yours. We read books to see the world differently, in this case, to make sense of it all: love, compassion, relationships, acceptance - all through God and faith.
A joyous read.
I simply do not have a religious bone in my body and my personal connection with Christianity is just a frail cultural one.
But books like this almost make me wish I had any kind of faith to be able to connect more to these feelings and reasoning behind them. This is a gorgeous novel: we see fragments of peoples lives, mostly through their letters, loosely interconnected. We see them dealing with their faith, their identity. We get introduced to religious history and theory. And connecting it all, slowly unfolding through the many narratives, diaries, conversations, news articles, there is the portait of Daniel - Ulitskaya's idea of a true holy man. She nearly convinced me. I wanted her to convince me.
Reading Ulitskaya you would think religion is a basic need of a person, that without it you're empty, like we all carry some God-shaped hole in our souls and the difference is only that some of us, as Daniel says towards the end of the book, choose to fill up that hole with other things: communism, fascism, vegetarianism or aliens..
I can't make sense of that. I do not have the personal connection to this lovely novel that I wish I had. But then, why else would you read books if not to be confronted with world views other than yours. We read books to see the world differently, in this case, to make sense of it all: love, compassion, relationships, acceptance - all through God and faith.
A joyous read.
April 25, 2023
Îmi doresc sa nu mai citesc cărți scrise asa cum le-aș fi scris eu. Vreau gânduri pe care nu le-am gândit deja.
Read
January 12, 2014„Urăsc problema evreiască, cu ea m-am intoxicat, nu cu sucul de roşii.”, spune Ludmila Uliţkaia într-una dintre scrisorile către editorul ei, inserate în romanul Daniel Stein, traducător. Povestea lui centrală trasează posibilitatea unei lumi în care Dumnezeu e unul singur şi în care diferenţe reale între evrei şi creştini nu există. Daniel Stein e cel care estompează aceste diferenţe. Dar nu oricum, ci de pe teritoriul creştinătăţii: e un evreu convertit la creştinism, pe care apoi va încerca să-l schimbe, din interior. Deci scriitoarea a ales o poveste în care „problema” (a cărei existenţă o ura) a dispărut prin asimilarea evreului în creştinism. Miroase a lucruri neconştientizate, nici de scriitoare, nici de personajul ei. (continuarea recenziei: http://bookaholic.ro/daniel-stein-cre...)
November 21, 2023
One of the best books I've read in a while, and I’m still thinking about it weeks after finishing it.
This is a multi-levelled novel written from the perspective of multiple narrators. It centers on the paradoxical life of Daniel Stein, a Polish Jew who became a translator during World War II, first working for the Gestapo, then for the Russians, and who managed to save hundreds of lives because of his position. While hiding in a monastery, he converted to Catholicism and, after the war, became a priest in Israel.
The optimistic tone, the humour and the gratitude that transpire from the testimony of the different survivors are elements that make this novel stand out from the others set during WW2 that I’ve read.
This is a multi-levelled novel written from the perspective of multiple narrators. It centers on the paradoxical life of Daniel Stein, a Polish Jew who became a translator during World War II, first working for the Gestapo, then for the Russians, and who managed to save hundreds of lives because of his position. While hiding in a monastery, he converted to Catholicism and, after the war, became a priest in Israel.
The optimistic tone, the humour and the gratitude that transpire from the testimony of the different survivors are elements that make this novel stand out from the others set during WW2 that I’ve read.
June 26, 2012
Книгу можно читать как художественное произведение, хотя в ней много религиозных вопросов, в первую очередь, связанных с иудаизмом и христианством. Будьте толерантны. Никогда не судите о людях по их национальности. Заповеди всех религий схожи. "Кабы все люди были хорошие, и войны бы не было".
January 7, 2021
„Daniel Stein. Tłumacz” Ludmiły Ulickiej to opowieść złożona z fragmentów wywiadów, listów, wycinków z dzienników, notatek czy pism urzędowych, które spina postać tytułowego bohatera. To postać wzorowana na Oswaldzie Rufeisenie, urodzonym w żydowskiej rodzinie polskim kapłanie katolickim, który po wyemigrowaniu do Izraela współtworzył hebrajską gminę chrześcijańską.
Te połączone mikro-historie tworzą kompleksową i uniwersalną opowieść o człowieku i o świecie. O postawach wobec zła, religii, polityki czy narodowości. Wiele w tej opowieści ciekawych i nieznanych mi faktów dotyczących judaizmu, islamu i chrześcijaństwa.
Za dużo w niej z kolei moralizatorstwa, momentami irytuje naiwnością, w 2/3 zaczęłam też odczuwać znużenie rozmiarem (blisko 600 stron), ale mimo to było to bardzo ciekawe i myślę, że nie ostatnie moje spotkanie z tą rosyjską pisarką.
Te połączone mikro-historie tworzą kompleksową i uniwersalną opowieść o człowieku i o świecie. O postawach wobec zła, religii, polityki czy narodowości. Wiele w tej opowieści ciekawych i nieznanych mi faktów dotyczących judaizmu, islamu i chrześcijaństwa.
Za dużo w niej z kolei moralizatorstwa, momentami irytuje naiwnością, w 2/3 zaczęłam też odczuwać znużenie rozmiarem (blisko 600 stron), ale mimo to było to bardzo ciekawe i myślę, że nie ostatnie moje spotkanie z tą rosyjską pisarką.
September 9, 2023
Дорога ложка к обеду. Мне эту книгу рекомендовали лет 8 назад, но всё откладывал. Тема интересная - евреи католики. Даниэль Штайн - это книжный псевдоним Освальда Руфайзена (информации о нем в интернете предостаточно, что правда, что нет сложно сказать).
Человек невероятный, конечно жизнь у него была необычная. Мог бы получиться реально захватывающий роман. Но, то ли автор не мой, то ли написано фигово, но читать было нудно. Короче не зашла книга, хотя возлагал на нее много надежд.
Человек невероятный, конечно жизнь у него была необычная. Мог бы получиться реально захватывающий роман. Но, то ли автор не мой, то ли написано фигово, но читать было нудно. Короче не зашла книга, хотя возлагал на нее много надежд.
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