Maybe Even Happiness

Ludovic Bruckstein was a Romanian/Jewish author and playwright who grew up in Sighet, in the Northern region of Transylvania, a town well known for its flourishing pre-war Jewish community and Hassidic tradition. Bruckstein edited a Yiddish newspaper called “Our Life” (Unzer Lebn), and in 1947 he wrote a play, describing a Sonder-kommando revolt in Auschwitz. The play, titled “The Night Shift” (Nacht-Shicht), written in Yiddish, was presented in Romania by both the Bucharest and Iassy Yiddish theaters, and was the first literary representation of this true event. His novels and stories are translated into Hebrew, French and English.

In this striking collection of short stories, written over a twenty-year period, we find Buckstein, the storyteller, at his most lyrical. Having completed his works charting the Jewish history of his family and community in the Carpathian town of Sighet (The Trap, With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, The Fate of Yakkov Maggid, also published in English by Istros), his voice is here set free to explore the joys in the details of the everyday. The collection opens with an invitation to a wax-work museum, where the viewer is not confronted with the likenesses of the rich and famous, but of ordinary people; neighbours and acquaintances each with a story to tell, each looking for that elusive feeling of happiness, which, unless we are very vigilant, is so often recognised only in retrospect. His heroes’ lives are presented with deep understanding, with humour, sometimes bordering on irony, but always with empathy and love. A sensitive reader need only follow the invitation, and let the wisdom of these stories guide them.