This suspenseful novel with elements of a thriller by a young Moldovan writer is set in his native Transnistria. It captures the grim reality of post-Soviet Moldova, mainly through the eyes of a child: poverty and life “behind the wall” in a railway cars converted into dwellings. Part of this reality is the civil war of the early 1990s and the emergence of the pro-Russian “Transnistrian Republic.”
Mother Odessa. In addition to its literary qualities, the novel Mama Odessa presents a view of the turbulent fate of Jews in the 20th century. It tells the story of a Russian-Jewish family from Odessa and artfully connects different time periods: Odessa during World War II, including the massacre of Odessa’s Jews in 1941, the late Stalinist period when the KGB persecuted the narrator’s father, emigration, and the present.
Sfumato. Welcome to Russia 2032. There is peace in the world. Russia, Europe, the United States and China signed a convention ten years ago that completely ruled out a nuclear war of aggression. Tired of the Kremlin‘s aggression, the world community reached an agreement with Russia: in exchange for its own security, the West no longer cares how the Russian government treats its citizens under its isolated power and only occasionally checks whether foreign policy agreements are respected. Human rights or repression within Russia are considered to be their internal affair. Russia is fenced and the borders are closed. America is no longer the enemy, the rhetoric has changed completely…
aneb židovská dobrodružství křesťanského chlapce, když skončilo šoa
Gojele. The Jewish adventures of a Christian boy after the end of Shoah. This partly autobiographical novel by Czech-German writer Karl von Wetzky takes place shortly after the Second World War. Twelve years old Heinrich Adolf and his mother are about to be deported to Germany, so they set off for a centre in northern Moravia that gathers Germans from the Bohemia for resettlement. However, by coincidence and due to a clerical error, they arrive in a small town where the surviving Jews are concentrated, preparing for their journey to Palestine.
The Steppe. In the hot summer of 2010, when the European part of Russia was engulfed by fires, a 20-year-old girl arrives from Siberia to meet her father, whom she hasn’t seen for ten years. Together they set off on a long journey in his truck and their destination is the untamed steppe in the south of the country. The father, who considers this inhospitable expanse his home and only possession, would like to share it with his grown daughter. However, the taiga-born girl is rather frightened by the open landscape and finds it strange.
The Age of Red Ants. This title is the fourth novel of Taňa Pjankova. It tells a story about the so-called Holodomor period, i.e. Ukrainian famine, that took place between 1932 and 1933. The story follows three main characters – Dusya, Svyryd and Solya – whose fates are the result of almost three years of studying archival materials. As the author herself states, they are not fictitious characters. In addition to this three storylines, the author also handles the contrast between the dying traditional village and the Soviet system, interestingly working with the embodiment of Hunger as an allegorical figure.
Under. The compelling prose Les Dessous (Underwear, 2020) follows three different girls, all of them on the cusp of adulthood. In a small French town in 1963, Elisabeth, hidden under a café table, listens to adult conversations. It’s the day of her friend Thérese’s funeral and she is also reading the diary of Henriette, a Jewish girl, who suffered persecution during the war. Secrets kept undisclosed in the French post-war small town are gradually coming to light. The world of teenage girls is confronted with the adult world, with war and collaboration, conformity and social violence, with large and small betrayals.
Příběhy, osudy a deportace 1942–1944
The Autobiography of a Parisian House. Stories, Fates and Deportations 1942–1944. At number 209 rue Saint-Maurus in the 10th arrondissement of Paris there is an apartment building where families of craftsmen and workers, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, have lived since the 1850s. Generations have grown up here, love and friendships have been forged and daily life has been regularly interrupted by the disasters and violence of the 20th century. Among others, nine Jewish children were deported from here in the 1940s. Their fates are the key to the author’s magnificent novel’s testimony about the memory of places and the invisible threads that connect the living and the dead.
In a Lonely Place. Psychological noir fiction with a criminal theme, which depicts post-war Los Angeles and the life of the upper middle class. The protagonist, Dix Steele, is a former World War II pilot living off his uncle’s money. At first, he appears to be merely someone, who is overly concerned with his appearance and places great emphasis on his own importance, but after meeting his former war buddy Brub, his wife Sylvia and after the encounter with an actress called Laurel, it becomes clear, that he can hardly control his aggression and resentment towards his own fate…
Skin. The novel written by the young Russian writer Evgenia Nekrasova is a story of two women, a black slave from the South of the U.S.A. and a Russian serf whose life stories overlap.
In the South of the U.S.A. a female slave is born and named Hope. Her mother tries to save her from the same fate as she herself has faced. However, they get separated and the new owner takes Hope away from America. Meanwhile in Russia a girl named Domna is born into a serf family and, being the youngest daughter, is cherished and spoilt. Than one day a carriage takes her away – her owner lost her in cards.
Wound. The prosaic debut by the poet Oksana Vasyakina is a documentary, autobiographic text which turns around the author’s journey with her mother’s ashes from the Volgograd region to her native Siberia.
King Sable’s Trip Around the World. The novel is inspired by the life and the memoirs of the traveler Maurice Benyovszky (1746-1786), who is considered a national hero in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.
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