Dreams of Jews In Postwar Prague
Lynn, David H.
Dreams of Jews In Postwar Prague Indecent Dreams by Arnost Lustig Northwestern University Press, 1989.159 pp., $17.95 Reviewed by David H. Lynn The Jews are gone. Yet their echoes, their shadows,...
...those of the young, archetypal Nazi judge who (unbidden) seeks shelter with her reveal his contempt, fear...
...Indecent Dreams, having already earned frontpage prominence in the New York Times Book Review, may well steal away some of Lustig's quiet anonymity at American University in Washington, D.C., where he teaches both fiction and screenwriting...
...Known only as "the lanky fellow's brother," his identity is indirect, attenuated...
...No longer—now his books are banned...
...In Czechoslovakia he wrote screenplays for several of his own novels, including Diamonds of the Night (known in this country as Darkness Casts No Shadow), the story of two boys' escape from a train of prisoners bound for Auschwitz...
...Lustig came to wide notice as a screenwriter and novelist during the New Wave of brilliant Czech films of the 1950s and 1960s...
...Again a Jew haunts the scene in the title story, "Indecent Dreams," the last of the tales...
...Yet their echoes, their shadows, their blasted innocence haunt the three novellas that make up this extraordinary volume...
...Ida Geron becomes the story's psychological leitmotif...
...ruthlessness...
...For she haunts the spirit of the young half-crazed partisan...
...Lustig himself escaped with his best friend from just such a train and in similar fashion, fleeing bullets, avoiding hostile peasants, eating tree bark for want of anything else...
...Smoke and tension are in the air, and the reader time and again catches whiffs of the heady stuff...
...A Jewess, Ida Geron, the apartment's previous occupant, has returned, not in the flesh nor even as a separate spirit, but as an obssessive memory haunting Inge Linge...
...His stories generate a power and frightful beauty precisely because they do not play on the expectations we carry along as readers...
...Perhaps that is why his star has been slow to shine in this country where tastes demand quick gratification rather than the subtler, more troubling rewards of complexity, of ambivalence...
...But she is not alone...
...This is no accident, given Lustig's mastery of writing for the screen as well as for the printed page...
...Prague's fever sweeps up the characters of "Indecent Dreams" into a confused excitement where once again sexuality, violence, and release all come into a terrible play...
...Like so many of his friends, including Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky (writers who, to a far greater degree than Lustig, have since re-established their fame on the international stage), he was forced to flee again, leaving Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion...
...Acclaimed as one of his country's most distinguished artists, his work once was required reading in schools and universities...
...David H. Lynn is Writer-in-Residence at Kenyon College in Ohio and editor of the Kenyon Review...
...What was her life...
...Inge Linge comes to fantasize about the departed Jewess...
...Of love...
...Arnost Lustig is that rare writer whose subject (forced on him by history, fate, and the necessities of his own imagination) is the Holocaust, yet who refuses the easy paths of sentimentalism or sensationalism, of moral self-righteousness or harrowing confession...
...Inge Linge is a parasite, having followed the conquerors into Prague and been set up in a fashionable apartment by an officer whose "von" has been purchased...
...So it is we find ourselves sympathizing with—admiring even as we recoil—the sturdy little German prostitute of "Blue Day," the first of the tales in Indecent Dreams...
...Inge Linge's thoughts reveal her yearning for human contact and sympathy...
...There she has provided succor and refuge and pleasure to the boys returning from the front...
...German occupiers and Czech survivors await an imminent end of war and the manifold judgments to be unleashed on those who have judged others so viciously...
...Indeed, this Jew dead and gone is, herself, one of the indecent dreams...
...What did she know of men...
...More striking, perhaps, and more masterful, is the narrator's darting omniscience, flicking here and there, back and forth between his characters and swaying again to a serene, cold-eyed detachment...
...Here is Prague, shattered and bleeding, at the edge of a second apocalypse...
...Indeed, our expectations are often balked, swiveled about like an errant compass...
...The effect is that of a camera eye probing interior landscapes...
Vol. 15 • February 1990 • No. 1
