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Billiards at the Hotel Dobray
In the northern Slovenian city of Murska Sobota stands the renowned Hotel Dobray, once the gathering place of townspeople of all nationalities and social strata who lived in this typical Pannonian panorama on the fringe of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Due to its historical and geographical particularities, the town had always been home to numerous ethnically and culturally mixed communities that gave it the charm and melos of Central-European identity. But now, in the thick of World War II, the town is occupied by the Hungarian army.
Franz Schwartz’s wife, Ellsie has for the past month been preparing their son Isaac, a gifted violinist, for his first solo concert, which is to take place at Hotel Dobray. Isaac is to perform on his bar mitzvah and his 13th birthday on April 26, 1944. When the German army marches into town and forces all Jews to display yellow stars on their clothes, Ellsie advises her husband that the family should flee the town and escape to Switzerland. Schwartz promises her he will obtain forged documents, but not before Isaac performs his concert at the hotel.
A year later, in March 1945, Schwartz returns, on foot, from the concentration camp as one of the few survivors.
Franz Schwartz’s wife, Ellsie has for the past month been preparing their son Isaac, a gifted violinist, for his first solo concert, which is to take place at Hotel Dobray. Isaac is to perform on his bar mitzvah and his 13th birthday on April 26, 1944. When the German army marches into town and forces all Jews to display yellow stars on their clothes, Ellsie advises her husband that the family should flee the town and escape to Switzerland. Schwartz promises her he will obtain forged documents, but not before Isaac performs his concert at the hotel.
A year later, in March 1945, Schwartz returns, on foot, from the concentration camp as one of the few survivors.
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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130 people want to read
About the author
Dušan Šarotar
21 books16 followers(Slovenija), rojen 1968. Je pisatelj, pesnik, scenarist,
urednik na Študentski založbi in urednik
literarne revije AirBeletrina (www.airbeletrina.
si). Na domačiji Miška Kranjca v Veliki
Polani organizira literarne večere. Je avtor šestih
dokumentarnih filmov pri RTV Slovenija.
Napisal je romana Potapljanje na dah (1999)
in Nočitev z zajtrkom (2003, tudi scenarij za
film), zbirko kratkih zgodb Mrtvi kot (2002)
ter pesniško zbirko Občutek za veter (2004).
Njegove zgodbe in pesmi so prevedene v več
jezikov.
urednik na Študentski založbi in urednik
literarne revije AirBeletrina (www.airbeletrina.
si). Na domačiji Miška Kranjca v Veliki
Polani organizira literarne večere. Je avtor šestih
dokumentarnih filmov pri RTV Slovenija.
Napisal je romana Potapljanje na dah (1999)
in Nočitev z zajtrkom (2003, tudi scenarij za
film), zbirko kratkih zgodb Mrtvi kot (2002)
ter pesniško zbirko Občutek za veter (2004).
Njegove zgodbe in pesmi so prevedene v več
jezikov.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 8, 2019
Billiards at the Hotel Dobray was translated by Rowley Grau from Dušan Šarotar’s Slovenian 2007 original and published by the wonderful Istros Books.
Panaroma (link to my review) (2015 in the original, 2016 in English) by the same author/translator/publisher combination was a beautiful and explicitly Sebaldian meditation on exile and loss.
Billiards on the Hotel Dobray is a rather different, but equally successful book. It is set in the town of Sóbota (the author’s home town, and indeed the story appears to be based on his inferences as to the story of his own grandfather) in 1944-5.
Sóbota, now in Slovenia, was at the time part of Hungary, but, in an isolated area of Prekmurje between two rivers, and largely insulated from much of the war.
The novel opens with a scene, both apocalyptic but melancholy, worthy, as another reviewer has noted (Petra Vidali in Večer), of a Bela Tarr film from a Krasznahorkai script:
A dull, hollow sky stretched down to the squat houses, which were wheezing shallow breaths into the damp, stifling air. These strange, colourless exhalations, rising from the dead earth and errant mists, had settled in front of the town – the varaš – like a mighty ghost from the past which not even children believed in any more. The secret that once lingered in these parts had again had to flee. It could be felt in the strange murmuring that hovered above the open plain. Now, at the hour of its departure, a sticky emptiness was opening. Somewhere deep down only oil stains and pillars of rock salt remained. Hidden in dense fog, which no wind would disperse for a long time, lay the last evidence that life could be any different.
The shine had faded long ago from the silver coffee spoons, and the determined clack of chessmen on chessboards, once intermingled with fervent conversations, had fallen silent. In the background of this genteel and seemingly well-mannered play of words and wit, the town lived its other, secret life. One sensed it as a devious, dire, even incurable disease that was slowing eating away at the idyllic façade. Perhaps it was only the spirit of the age, about which there had been so much discussion, but everyone agreed that the golden years they had shared were passing, the days when on the street, in coffee houses or at the cinema, the people of this small world, hidden from the world outside, would meet and greet each other as in a big communal garden.
Sadness, inexplicable melancholy and staring at dark landscape paintings and faded photographs, long solitary daydreaming and, especially, sinking into silence – these were all signs of the chronic disease that had been gaining power over the varaš.
At this hour, in late March, in the year 1945, all that could be heard from the cellar bars and illicit taprooms was an incomprehensible mix of half-drunken tongues struggling to keep up with the tuneless wail of violins and cracked drums. Now the only things in tune, playing with manful resolution, were the army bugles, which were summoning soldiers to the final march.
[...]
Thus had the town stood in isolation, gazing inwards and almost forgotten - by God, but grand politics and even by the slaughter of war. But now, as war was approaching its denouement, an evil eye had suddenly started exchanging glances with this backwater worlds.
(from a longer extract at https://bodyliterature.com/2019/10/19...)
But for some in the town the slaughter of war had already struck. As Wikipedia explains:
Everything was as if on a well-preserved postcard, which you keep safe even though you have no desire to look at it a second time.
A real-life postcard of the Hotel Dobray at the centre of the town and the novel.
The novel itself covers the life of the town over the few days as the Russian troops approach, and the power in the town shifts, as well as returning to the events of April 1944 and the story of the family of Franz Schwartz. And it ends with a sobering 'what happened next'
The Sóbota Jewish community, one of the largest Jewish communities in what was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia before the Second World War, never recovered.
Decimated, impoverished and heavily stigmatised, the returning Jews were not able to form a minyan, a quorum of ten male Jewish adults required for the ritual reading from a sefer Torah at the synagogue, so the synagogue remained closed after the war.
After the synagogue was repeatedly broken into, looted and destroyed, the army began using it as a stable for its horses.
In 1954 the Sóbota authorities ordered the demolition of the synagogue. Soon after, according to plans by the architect Feri Novak, the first modern housing block in Murska Sobota was built on the site. To this day it is known locally as the ‘Jewish block’.
An atmospheric, moving and important novel.
Panaroma (link to my review) (2015 in the original, 2016 in English) by the same author/translator/publisher combination was a beautiful and explicitly Sebaldian meditation on exile and loss.
Billiards on the Hotel Dobray is a rather different, but equally successful book. It is set in the town of Sóbota (the author’s home town, and indeed the story appears to be based on his inferences as to the story of his own grandfather) in 1944-5.
Sóbota, now in Slovenia, was at the time part of Hungary, but, in an isolated area of Prekmurje between two rivers, and largely insulated from much of the war.
The novel opens with a scene, both apocalyptic but melancholy, worthy, as another reviewer has noted (Petra Vidali in Večer), of a Bela Tarr film from a Krasznahorkai script:
A dull, hollow sky stretched down to the squat houses, which were wheezing shallow breaths into the damp, stifling air. These strange, colourless exhalations, rising from the dead earth and errant mists, had settled in front of the town – the varaš – like a mighty ghost from the past which not even children believed in any more. The secret that once lingered in these parts had again had to flee. It could be felt in the strange murmuring that hovered above the open plain. Now, at the hour of its departure, a sticky emptiness was opening. Somewhere deep down only oil stains and pillars of rock salt remained. Hidden in dense fog, which no wind would disperse for a long time, lay the last evidence that life could be any different.
The shine had faded long ago from the silver coffee spoons, and the determined clack of chessmen on chessboards, once intermingled with fervent conversations, had fallen silent. In the background of this genteel and seemingly well-mannered play of words and wit, the town lived its other, secret life. One sensed it as a devious, dire, even incurable disease that was slowing eating away at the idyllic façade. Perhaps it was only the spirit of the age, about which there had been so much discussion, but everyone agreed that the golden years they had shared were passing, the days when on the street, in coffee houses or at the cinema, the people of this small world, hidden from the world outside, would meet and greet each other as in a big communal garden.
Sadness, inexplicable melancholy and staring at dark landscape paintings and faded photographs, long solitary daydreaming and, especially, sinking into silence – these were all signs of the chronic disease that had been gaining power over the varaš.
At this hour, in late March, in the year 1945, all that could be heard from the cellar bars and illicit taprooms was an incomprehensible mix of half-drunken tongues struggling to keep up with the tuneless wail of violins and cracked drums. Now the only things in tune, playing with manful resolution, were the army bugles, which were summoning soldiers to the final march.
[...]
Thus had the town stood in isolation, gazing inwards and almost forgotten - by God, but grand politics and even by the slaughter of war. But now, as war was approaching its denouement, an evil eye had suddenly started exchanging glances with this backwater worlds.
(from a longer extract at https://bodyliterature.com/2019/10/19...)
But for some in the town the slaughter of war had already struck. As Wikipedia explains:
On 26 April 1944, all of the Jews were ordered to gather in the Murska Sobota synagogue, with hand luggage only. There, they were locked up overnight without food or water, and the next morning all the Jews of Murska Sobota were transferred to Čakovec and then to Nagykanizsa, the main concentration camp before their final destination of Auschwitz.And as the story begins one of the few survivors, a merchant Franz Schwartz, returns to the town. He notes that the scene is familiar - other than the change of name on some formerly Jewish owned businesses:
Everything was as if on a well-preserved postcard, which you keep safe even though you have no desire to look at it a second time.
A real-life postcard of the Hotel Dobray at the centre of the town and the novel.
The novel itself covers the life of the town over the few days as the Russian troops approach, and the power in the town shifts, as well as returning to the events of April 1944 and the story of the family of Franz Schwartz. And it ends with a sobering 'what happened next'
The Sóbota Jewish community, one of the largest Jewish communities in what was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia before the Second World War, never recovered.
Decimated, impoverished and heavily stigmatised, the returning Jews were not able to form a minyan, a quorum of ten male Jewish adults required for the ritual reading from a sefer Torah at the synagogue, so the synagogue remained closed after the war.
After the synagogue was repeatedly broken into, looted and destroyed, the army began using it as a stable for its horses.
In 1954 the Sóbota authorities ordered the demolition of the synagogue. Soon after, according to plans by the architect Feri Novak, the first modern housing block in Murska Sobota was built on the site. To this day it is known locally as the ‘Jewish block’.
An atmospheric, moving and important novel.
December 30, 2019
Slow, simmering, painfully melancholic, this is the tale of a sleepy Slovenian town suspended between two critical moments near the end of the Second World War, between the imposition of the Final Solution and Russian liberation. Crafted with a poetic voice and a cinematic eye, this is one of my top reads of 2019. Very different than Sarotar's Sebldian inflected novel "Panorama", one is nonetheless in the hands of a gifted storyteller. He is one of my favourite writers.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2019/12/29/th...
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2019/12/29/th...
August 2, 2024
New obsession: Szlovén irodalom
August 5, 2020
This is a chillingly human story that revolves around two crucial dates a year apart, in 1944 and 1945. It tells of the critical moments in the lives of a handful of characters; an Auschwitz survivor and former shopkeeper’s return home, a young girl’s first love, an abject group of fatigued Hungarian soldiers awaiting certain defeat, and the secret an aging prostitute at the Hotel Dobray. The Hotel, and more specifically the billiard table, stand testament as players on it come and go.
It is a story told in reverse; Šarotar opting to put most affecting section as the third part of the book, after 150 pages: Franz Schwartz is the Auschwitz survivor, whose wife Ellsie, a year earlier, had been preparing their son Isaac, a gifted violinist, for his first solo concert, which is to take place at Hotel Dobray on his bar mitzvah and 13th birthday on April 26, 1944. But the German Army marches into town.
A year later the Hotel Dobray in Sóbota (now Slovenia), then a borderland between Hungary and what would become Yugoslavia, is a sad remnant of its former glory, a billet for the Hungarian soldiers awaiting the inevitable, when once it hosted dinners, meetings, concerts and a casino for the wealthy. Chandeliers still hang from the ceilings, and red carpets are still there, though they have been torn and muddied by soldiers' boots.
The tension as the Red Army approaches is wonderfully described. Šarotar paints a picture of such detail that it is as if you enter into the story and are contained within its atmosphere; brooding, claustrophobic, menacing.
This is a remarkable historic view of the writer’s hometown which led a few years after publication to the town putting up its first memorial to its fallen Jews.
It is a story told in reverse; Šarotar opting to put most affecting section as the third part of the book, after 150 pages: Franz Schwartz is the Auschwitz survivor, whose wife Ellsie, a year earlier, had been preparing their son Isaac, a gifted violinist, for his first solo concert, which is to take place at Hotel Dobray on his bar mitzvah and 13th birthday on April 26, 1944. But the German Army marches into town.
A year later the Hotel Dobray in Sóbota (now Slovenia), then a borderland between Hungary and what would become Yugoslavia, is a sad remnant of its former glory, a billet for the Hungarian soldiers awaiting the inevitable, when once it hosted dinners, meetings, concerts and a casino for the wealthy. Chandeliers still hang from the ceilings, and red carpets are still there, though they have been torn and muddied by soldiers' boots.
The tension as the Red Army approaches is wonderfully described. Šarotar paints a picture of such detail that it is as if you enter into the story and are contained within its atmosphere; brooding, claustrophobic, menacing.
This is a remarkable historic view of the writer’s hometown which led a few years after publication to the town putting up its first memorial to its fallen Jews.
November 20, 2025
A slow read which I enjoyed less for the style than for the content. I knew little if nothing of M Sobota history and esp Jews there since the topic in Slovenia is entirely neglected. Tragic - and even more the fact it happened to close to the end. A really interesting read of event during and inmediately after WW2 in Prekmurje, now Slovenia. Well translated too.
October 26, 2024
Tucked in between Hungary and Yugoslavia (Slovenia), in a small (mythical) unnamed country, the citizens of Sóbota await the arrival of the Red Army as World War 2 comes to an end. It’s not as if anyone is all that excited about the pending Soviet arrival, except that it might bring about the end of the war, but little else is known.
The townsfolk are all rather ordinary, generally suspicious of other people’s goals and actions, with some trying to position themselves for success in the pending new world, while others resist it. Most seem to go with the flow, with to a large degree the story circulating around five figures. There is Sárdy, the leader of the Hungarian occupying force – an opportunist fascist who realises he has to hang on fight his last battle. Then there is one of his troop – a conscript who really doesn’t want to be there, who does not believe in the way his commander does but can’t see a way out. Also stuck in the Hotel Dobray with them is there is Linna – formerly the singer with the house band who has survived the war by being a sex worker, and who hopes for other options. Aside for this group there is the local industrialist – whose opportunism is just as cynical as Sárdy’s and just as self-interested. And finally there is Schwartz, Jewish and deported, who has escaped the death camps and has returned home, and in doing so seems to offer Linna an option.
The events take place over a few days, as the town’s residents remain mainly apart from each other – there is no point in going to the hotel or tavern, and the sounds of war make clear that there really is nowhere else to go, so they wait for the end. Yet it is not a glum or bleak story – despite its tragedy and Šarotar’s critique of the men with power. Just deserts are earned; in Schwartz, the unwilling trooper, and Linna there are stories of hope and possibility, and there is sense of getting by in the mundane world of the everyday as liberation lightens the load –at least briefly. Šarotar doesn’t overplay the difficulties but neither does he depict this slightly absurd world lightly nor demand too much pathos: for all its big issues – fascism, the holocaust, Soviet occupation, the fragility of lives in wartime and more – this is a delightfully small tale of a few days when everything changed, but no-one was sure how.
The townsfolk are all rather ordinary, generally suspicious of other people’s goals and actions, with some trying to position themselves for success in the pending new world, while others resist it. Most seem to go with the flow, with to a large degree the story circulating around five figures. There is Sárdy, the leader of the Hungarian occupying force – an opportunist fascist who realises he has to hang on fight his last battle. Then there is one of his troop – a conscript who really doesn’t want to be there, who does not believe in the way his commander does but can’t see a way out. Also stuck in the Hotel Dobray with them is there is Linna – formerly the singer with the house band who has survived the war by being a sex worker, and who hopes for other options. Aside for this group there is the local industrialist – whose opportunism is just as cynical as Sárdy’s and just as self-interested. And finally there is Schwartz, Jewish and deported, who has escaped the death camps and has returned home, and in doing so seems to offer Linna an option.
The events take place over a few days, as the town’s residents remain mainly apart from each other – there is no point in going to the hotel or tavern, and the sounds of war make clear that there really is nowhere else to go, so they wait for the end. Yet it is not a glum or bleak story – despite its tragedy and Šarotar’s critique of the men with power. Just deserts are earned; in Schwartz, the unwilling trooper, and Linna there are stories of hope and possibility, and there is sense of getting by in the mundane world of the everyday as liberation lightens the load –at least briefly. Šarotar doesn’t overplay the difficulties but neither does he depict this slightly absurd world lightly nor demand too much pathos: for all its big issues – fascism, the holocaust, Soviet occupation, the fragility of lives in wartime and more – this is a delightfully small tale of a few days when everything changed, but no-one was sure how.
April 2, 2025
Mostly set around a few days in March 1945, Billiards at Hotel Dobray focuses on the shifting and chaotic dynamics — like billiard balls — in real-life Murska Sobota, now in modern-day Slovenia, in the closing months of World War Two. It highlights the persecution and extermination of the Jewish people in the area, based on actual events which Šarotar says are rarely confronted. It follows a variety of characters circulating in and around the central Hotel Dobray, a base for the Nazi-allied Hungarian occupating forces. They include concentration camp survivor Franz Schwartz, sex worker and resistance operative Linna, anti-fascist factory owner Josip Benko, Lutheran tailor Géza Šiftar and his daughter Edina as well as József Sárdy, the useless and amoral secretary of Hungary’s local Office of the Special Military Tribunal, and Hungarian private Kolosváry. After flashing back to the abduction of Jewish citizens to concentration camps in 1944, it ends in the repressive and anti-semitic regime of the newly-invaded Russian Communists. Despite the narrative’s ominous bleakness, it ends with a glimmer of hope.
March 19, 2024
Great, great atmosphere and some melancholy... About how to maintain normal, ordinary life in extraordinary times and how to stay human in savage circumstances. As with all great literature, it is more about the style, about how this is written, and not about the events described, since there is not much happening here. The Holocaust is a great theme, and just when it seems everything has already been written on the subject - one finds such a gem of a book as this one. I could not put it down, the atmosphere completely captured me. It reminded me of another wonderful book by W. G. Sebald Austerlitz
Do read both!
Do read both!
Currently reading
July 19, 2023Purchased, now waiting to be read.
May 26, 2024
Very atmospheric and unsettling.
August 23, 2024
A nice poetic style full of melancholy and pain. The hotel and the life of its visitors are witness and victims of the war. A new word where survival became the driving force of the population and everything is possible.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews