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THE
SORROWFUL EYES OF HANNAH KARAJICH |
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Translated by Iris Urwin Lewitová, with an Introduction by Miroslav Holub Ivan Olbracht (1882-1952) was an important Czech novelist and journalist whose other major work, set in the Sub-Carpathian region, is Nikola Šuhaj, The Robber. Miroslav Holub (1923-1998) was an outstanding contemporary Czech poet and essayist. Much of his work was translated into English, both in anthologies and individual volumes including On the Contrary and Other Poems and The Fly. The introduction to this novel was one of the last things he wrote before his death in 1998. The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich is a lyrical, deeply moving story of love and the pain of emancipation, set in the now vanished world of rural East European Jewish village life. Hanna is the most beautiful girl in all Polona, an orthodox Jewish village in the remote province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Involvement in the exciting new movement of Zionism takes her away to a commune in a nearby town. But there she meets and falls in love with the strangely named Ivo Karajich: a Jew, yet not a Jew. The agonizing drama that follows, plants into her beautiful almond-shaped eyes the hard grain of sorrow that her children, too, will inherit. Olbracht’s novella is both a great love story and a marvellous portrait of a world that modernity threatened and Hitler destroyed.
Autumn
1999 |
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