Ein Jude als Exempel

by Jacques Chessex, Grete Osterwald (Übersetzer)

A novel based on a true story.

On April 16, 1942, a handful of Swiss Nazis in Payerne lure Arthur Bloch, a Jewish cattle merchant, into an empty stable and kill him with a crowbar. Europe is in flames, but this is Switzerland, and Payerne, a rural market town of butchers and bankers, is more worried about unemployment and local bankruptcies than the fate of nations across the border. Fernand Ischi, leader of the local Nazi cell, blames it all on the town’s Jewish population and wants to set an example, thinking the German embassy would be grateful. Ischi's dream of becoming the local gauleiter is shattered, however, when the milk containers used to dissimulate Bloch's body parts is discovered floating in a lake nearby, leading to his arrest.

Jacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is one of Switzerland’s greatest authors. He knew the murderers, went to school with their children, and has written a terse, implacable story that has awakened memories in a country that seems to endlessly rediscover dark areas of its past.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, France, Holocaust, War, Jewish, Historical

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Jacques Chessex was a Swiss author and painter.

Born in Payern, Switzerland Chessex is a poet, writer and artist. He is among the most important writers who write in French. In 1973, he received international recognition when he became the first Swiss to win the biggest French literary prize - "Goncourt" for his novel "L'Ogre ". The same model was the first foreigner awarded the prestigious award. In 2004 and received "Goncourt" for poetry.

Jacques Chessex died in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, of a heart attack during a meeting with the readers on October 9, 2009

Source: http://www.shvoong.com/books/2232838-...

Reviews

[notgettingenough · Rating 4 out of 5]

What better time to be reading this book than now, a time like that time, when people across Europe are saying just that. A Jew must die.

This is the sort of book that will only be read by those who don’t need to.

Rest here:

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chilling, stomach-turning account of a real-life event that transpired in Chessex's hometown. Nearly erased from history, this tale resurfaces thanks to the haunting testimony of the elderly author, forever scarred by the atrocities he witnessed at eight years old. The town of Payerne, it seems, has all but forgotten this dark chapter.

The narrator adopts the voice of the anti-Semitic townspeople, quoting Mein Kampf and scapegoating the Jews for their misfortunes. Fernand Ischi, swayed by the poisonous rhetoric of Pastor Lugrin, felt compelled to establish Hitler's dominion in Switzerland. Lugrin formed a small group of men who plotted in a garage a welcoming act of Nazi solidarity intended to pave the way for Hitler's rule. Their sinister plan involved targeting a prominent Jew, Arthur Bloch, a successful cattle dealer.

Lured from Market Square to a secluded shed under false pretenses, Bloch falls victim to the bigots' murderous scheme. His death is intended as a twisted birthday tribute to Hitler. The reaction of Payerne's citizens is as disturbing as the means employed by Ischi's accomplices.

The stark, unadorned narrative of A Jew Must Die amplifies its chilling impact. The facts speak for themselves. Readers seeking to comprehend that era and glimpse the depths of human darkness will find this concise book a profound and unsettling read:

"In these remote countrysides the hatred of the Jew has a taste of soil mulled over in bitterness, turned over and ruminated, with the glister of pig’s blood and the isolated cemeteries from where the bones the dead still speak, of misappropriated inheritances, suicides, bankruptcies and embittered, frustrated bodies a hundred times humiliated. Hearts and groins have oozed a heavy broth into the black, age-old earth, mingling their thick humours in the opaque soil with the blood of herds of swine and horned cattle. The mind, or what remains of it, inflamed by murky family and political jealousies, is looking for a scapegoat to blame for all life’s injustice and suffering, and finds it in the Jew, so different from us, with his prominent nose, olive complexion and crinkly hair on his broad skull. A Jew has a bank account and a big belly - nothing surprising in that. The Jew and his circumcision. The Jew that doesn’t eat the way we do. The Jew grown fat from robbing us with banks, pawnbroking and dealing in the cattle horses he sells to army. Our army!"

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book, the last that Chessex wrote, reminded me of Duras's L'Amant, which I read a few weeks earlier. In both, we have the author, knowing they were near death, trying to make sense of something which had haunted their dreams since their childhoods. For Duras, it was her first affair, when she was a rebellious 15 year old school-girl wearing gold-lamé shoes and a man's hat. For Chessex, it was a particularly horrible murder, which happened in his village when he was 8. Both authors adopt similar solutions. They don't moralize, wring their hands, or express indignation. They just give you the facts, in as simple and straightforward a way as they can. As with Duras, the result is moving and disturbing.

The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This devastating short novel by the late Swiss writer Jacques Chessex concerns the actual murder of a Jewish cattle merchant in Switzerland in 1942. Chessex alternates between a terse, factual third person voice and, through the use of free indirect discourse, the horribly anti-semitic voices of the Swiss right-wing killers. The result is a chilling account of hate and its ghastly results. Toward the end of the novel, Chessex steps away from his story to address directly the question of whether one can or should speak of such events and then describes his own encounter with Pastor Phillippe Lugrin, the hate-mongering Christian leader who inspired the murder and then fled to Germany to become a part of the Nazi war machine. Chessex wrote this book toward the end of his life and, at least so it seems to me, is trying to come to terms with the anti-Semitism in his homeland he witnessed as a child. But he can find no comfort and ends the novel with his plea, "Have pity, Lord, on our crimes."

[Lieke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kort maar krachtig.

[Pete Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chessex continued to look into the dark corners of Switzerland’s past right up to this, his last-but-one novel. It looks at the 1942 murder of Arthur Bloch, a well-to-do Jewish cattle dealer in Payerne by some Swiss Nazi sympathisers, meant as an offering to the Führer just a few days before Hitler’s birthday. It wasn’t just a random murder – how the teenage killers also disposed of the body was particularly gruesome. This short novel was not well received in Switzerland, possibly because the Nazi chant of ‘death to the Jews’ is frequently put across in the first person alongside some possibly gratuitous S&M imagery, plus Chessex has a cynical take on Swiss indifference. Payerne is also where Chessex grew up and the last chapter neatly but remotely connects him to the event as he explores the culpability of a particularly notorious pro-Nazi religious leader. I found this was just as good, and sad, and well-told a story as his other recent biographical novel The Vampire of Ropraz, and in short doses like this Chessex makes a memorable impression.

[Zygintas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Labai verta perskaityti dėl pamokomos istorijos. Tačiau papasakota nuobodžiai (vertimo problema?). Istorija trumpa (77 puslapiai), lyg ir neištempta, tačiau skaityta labai lėtai. Ir ne dėl to, kad mėgautasi.
Ilgėlesnis straipsnis apie šią tikrą istoriją normaliame žurnale ar interneto portale būtų suskaitytas su daug didesniu malonumu.

[The Book · Rating 2 out of 5]

A novella that made me feel numb and cold, chilled by something that was done to and by people the author knew. I didn't enjoy reading it, which is why it has two stars, but it's a powerful story and should be read.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminded me of Chronicle of a Death Foretold in that it’s a step-by-step recounting of a single person’s death and, like Márquez’s book, is based on actual events and was also a death that could’ve easily been prevented as many turned a blind eye towards the hate-mongering:

They'd rather cut out their tongues, rupture their eyes and ears, than admit they know what is being plotted in the garage. In the back rooms of certain cafés. In the woods. At Pastor Lugrin's.

Like Márquez, Chessex was there at the time:

I was eight years old when these events took place. In high school I sat next to Fernand Ischi’s eldest daughter. The son of the officer commanding the police station who arrested Ischi was a pupil in that same class. So was the son of Judge Caprez, who would preside over the trial of Arthur Bloch’s murderers.

Death becomes meaningless when you start talking about millions of dead:

What is horror? When the philosopher Jankélévitch proclaims the entire crime of the Holocaust to be “imprescriptible”, he forbids me to speak of it exempt from that edict. Imprescriptible. That can never be forgiven. That can never be paid for. Nor forgotten. Nor benefit from any statute of limitations. No possible redemption of any kind. Absolute evil, for which there can be no absolution ever.

This book deals with a single death. And in Switzerland of all places. But then just because a country stays neutral that doesn’t mean that individual citizens are not entitled to hold their own (sometimes radical) views. And that’s what happened here. A small enclave of Swiss Nazis decide, partly as a birthday present for Hitler, to execute a Jew. The choice is fairly arbitrary since as far as they’re concerned the German army was only days—weeks at the most—away from taking over the whole country and then there’d be no escape for any Jew.

In the end the heinous choice falls on the devout, well-to-do Arthur Bloch, a Jewish cattle-dealer from Berne, well known to the farmers and butchers throughout the area, making him an obvious and exemplary victim.

Unlike a book like Tzili by Aharon Appelfeld there’s little subtle about this book. It’s a blunt instrument. This how it happened. This is who was involved. This is how they did it. This is how they disposed of the body. This is how the townspeople reacted. This is how they were caught. So a Swiss version of In True Blood, a non-fiction novel. There’s even some black humour in this retelling. The Nazis are unprepared for the task in hand and pretty much make up and botch up their plan on the hop. A far cry from the finely-tuned, well-oiled German war machine that never did arrive to save and vindicate them.

A particularly striking moment in the book takes place in the summer of 1964 when the narrator runs into Pastor Philippe Lugrin, a member subversively of the Vaud League, the National Front, the National Union and the Swiss National Movement. At the time Lugrin, who was the mastermind behind the murder, fled to Germany with the help of the diplomatic services of the Reich but later he was caught and sentenced to twenty-one years. “He served two thirds of his time and came out more ardent than ever, virulent in the density of his hatred.”

[A]bandoning all discretion, I decide to sit opposite him and scrutinize him with intense curiosity. I cannot be mistaken. I have seen him only in photographs, but this is him all right, the fearsome Lugrin, sitting by himself just a few inches away. I stare at him; he stares back with the wary, arrogant gaze of a man always ready with a reply and prepared to make his escape. Deep-blue eyes. Angelic. Features unmarked by prison. High forehead. Long, narrow nose. Little round spectacles, whose metal rims frame the brilliant blue eyes that still gaze back at me. A man of God? A man of Satan. The demon has confused the bearings, distorted the aims, invested and perverted the remaining fire in this dead soul.

This is a striking book. And important because, like Tzili, it takes place at a distance from the war and involves ordinary people: Fernand Ischi was “an unskilled helper in the family garage and occasional repairer of bicycles and motorcycles”, Georges Ballotte, only nineteen, was an apprentice mechanic, the Marmier brothers had turned to carting to try to make a living after they lost their farm, Fritz Joss was one of their labourers. I imagine many of the young men who’ve got on planes and flown off to Syria and Iraq in recent months to fight for what they’ve come to believe in are just like these.

"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history."
George Bernard Shaw

[Anna Thomson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Franchement pas trop mal, mais pas du tout bon non plus. Beaucoup de violence sans autant d’introspection.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew me away. I picked it up at the library, drawn to its bizarre title. Based on a true story, author Jacques Chessex recounts his memories of the brutal killing of a butcher in his home town of Payerne Switzerland. From the age of 8, when the crime planted seeds of guilt in his young mind, it took a lifetime for him to let this writing come to the surface.

He refers to the words of French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch, whom I had to research further. Moral, philosophical and religious questions surfaced for me in reading this book... they are meant to. The author's style of writing is sparse on adjectives but precise. I found myself appreciating the depth he managed to convey with the accurate placement and choice of words. He has won literary awards in France and Switzerland. He raises an important question about God, but acknowledges age-old fearful behavior that has bearing on today's political climate (in my modest opinion).

[Fruchtfleisch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Payerne 1943. Der Autor war damals 8 Jahre alt und dort ansässig; dass sich die Ära Hitler mit all ihren Konsequenzen zu seinen Lebzeiten ereignen konnte, das lässt ihn sein Leben lang nicht los.

Von der Naziideologie infizierte Männer morden und schlachten damals "als Exempel" einen jüdischen Viehhändler, die Tat soll allen offenbaren, was die Zukunft bringen wird. Jacques Chessex gelingt es, die Unvorstellbarkeit, zu welchen Greueltaten die Menschen in der Lage sind, in Worte zu fassen.

Ich muss dringend noch mehr von dem Autor lesen, sein Stil imponiert mir sehr.

Angemerkt sei noch, dass dieser Roman von der Länge her eher eine Novelle ist.

[Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any European countries which managed to remain neutral during WW2, did it by reaching some level of accommodation with fascism. Switzerland was surrounded by actively fascist countries, German occupied countries and countries cooperating with Germany and its allies.
This book is very short, but packs a lot of power into its few pages.
The author takes an incident and uses it to examine the various levels of accommodation with fascism within Switzerland, both pragmatic and ideological.

[Pep Bonet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il se lit d'une seule fois, car il se serre à toi et ne te laisse l'abandonner. Chessex utilise un langage fort, efficace, pour conter cette histoire de méchanceté animale, de barbarie inhumaine, démonstration de la dégradation humaine au service d'idées corrompues et assassines. Le rôle dans l'ombre du pasteur, de l'homme de dieu devenu serviteur du diable, plane sur les pages du livre. J'ai bien aimé.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't find this either terribly interesting or effective. Perhaps it sounds better in French than in translation - but it lacks plot, character, there is no development, it is essayistic but its reflections are not terribly original or memorable.

[Thomas Andrikus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked this book for its brevity, despite harrowly describing in detail a WW2 experience.

[Lyazzat · Rating 5 out of 5]

a novel based on a true story.

[Anto_s1977 · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Un ebreo come esempio" è un romanzo breve dello scrittore svizzero Jacques Chessex, edito da Fazi Editori nel 2011, che racconta un caso di cronaca realmente accaduto nell'aprile del 1942 a Payerne, un borgo del cantone di Vaud.
In un momento storico così buio, anche in Svizzera si diffusero le idee razziste e i pregiudizi contro gli ebrei, accusati di essere sanguisughe che osavano arricchirsi, ostacolando gli affari degli onesti commercianti svizzeri.
A fomentare gli animi un pastore protestante, Philippe Lugrin, uomo gretto e spietato, che "ha scelto il territorio della Broye per infiltrarsi tra i disoccupati, i piccoli contadini rovinati e gli operai che rischiano di perdere il posto. Nelle sale interne dei caffè di Payerne e della campagna circostante, questo personaggio tiene comizi violentemente fondati sull'odio verso gli ebrei e l'Internazionale Giudea".
Il fuoco, si sa, divampa facilmente: uno degli ebrei deve pagare con la propria vita e rappresentare un monito per tutti gli altri.
"Un ebreo come esempio" è un piccolo volume, che si legge in poco tempo, ma che ben descrive come l'odio e la follia umana, quando si mescolano, possano indurre a varcare il limite, a scegliere il Male, a portare alla luce il lato oscuro, a credersi un essere superiore.
Come ben scrive l'autore, con uno stile ricercato e asciutto, è il racconto dell'imprescrittibile: "Ciò che non si perdona. Ciò che non sarà mai ripagato. Né dimenticato. Né prescritto. Nessun riscatto di nessuna specie. Il male assoluto, senza patteggiamento per sempre".

[Viktoriya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is such a powerful horrific story and it must be told. However, I am not sure that telling it in a short novella like this (less than 100 pages) was a good way to do it. Like with all short(er) stories, it left me wanting more and left me with more questions than answers: I wanted to learn more about the village where the murder took place, how did they see it afterwards, I wanted to read about the actual trial, not just how many years each perpetrator was sentenced too, I wanted to learn more about Arthur Bloch, the innocent victim, a Jewish cattle-trader, who was murdered in such a savage way. Most of all, I want to go back to this village and its people some years after the events, after the war ended.

[Perlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, I had no idea of this horrific event until reading what I thought was purely a novel. It turns out to be true, and I don't know that I'm emotionally equipped to review this book. It definitely brought to mind the bestial murder of Ilan Halimi - Hashem yinkom damo.
While I was certainly aware of Switzerland's famed neutrality, I was less familiar with its Nazi side. The writing is pared down, quiet in tone, and almost factually neutral in its telling of this murder. As the saying goes, six million killed is a statistic; a single killed is a tragedy. I'm including links because I can't do this justice.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1...
https://www.bitterlemonpress.com/blog...

[Anthony J Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Painful

This novella is painful to read, reflecting as it does the dark days of WW2. And yet the author confronts us with dark events, very graphically described in neutral, peaceful Switzerland. If we reflect for a second there was nothing that made that neutral country full of saints. This is of course the moral of the tale. Fascism and evil are within many.

[Diogenes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This very short novel is really more of an essay, lamenting the antisemitism and the apathy of the plight of Jews rampant in so many Swiss during the Nazi era. It details the murder of one Jew and of the people responsible, which polluted the author's memory of his cherished birthplace. The title would be more properly translated from the French as "A Jew for Example".

[Marguerite · Rating 4 out of 5]

A searing indictment of antisemitism in Switzerland during hitler’s regime. A group of thugs, instigated by a rabidly antiemetic clergyman, selects a Jewish merchant to kill. Gripping. I found myself holding my breath, even though the outcome was obvious. Just a small, insignificant town in Switzerland (known for its neutrality during WW2). Not so much. A powerful short read.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked up this slim novel from the library about a week before the tragic event on Oct 27 in Pittsburgh. Depressing how so little has changed since 1942. Novel reads more like a piece of narrative nonfiction.

[Braekeveldt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covid 19 must have been around since many years if the Prix Goncourt has been given to this book. From a literary point of view an insult to obtain the award. From a content and message point of view, a small book that should be read by many.

[Beatriz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking.

[Emilija Filipenkovaitė · Rating 3 out of 5]

„Nieko neįmanoma paaiškinti, niekas niekada neatsiveria tam, kuris kartą ir visiems laikams patyrė skriaudą, padarytą kitai sielai”

[Daiva Vanagė · Rating 5 out of 5]

Labai gera knyga. Tiesiog siaubingai beprasmiška žmogžudystės istorija.

[Ringa Sruogienė · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gal vertimas kaltas...

[SophieBURS11 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wooow!