The Inventory
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Combining the authenticity of reportage with the emotional intensity of an extraordinary imagination, The Inventory is a profoundly unsettling account of the effects of Nazi paranoia upon every segment of German society. Writing with piercing clarity and searing irony, Gila Lustiger weaves together the tales of ordinary people swept up in a society where brutal oppression and extermination are everyday events.
Amid the routine of daily life—with its flirtations and quarrels, longings and disappointments—the mechanism of persecution spares no one: A renowned opera singer is savagely beaten for suspicion of homosexuality; a mother writes to the Ghetto Administration for a good deal on penknives confiscated from Jewish deportees; a student is tortured by the Gestapo for a vague association with the Young Socialist Workers; a husband files for divorce when his wife shops at a Jewish-owned store. Intersecting stories of common citizens, both sinned against and sinning, reveal uncanny, entwined relationships in a nation where no one remains untouched by suspicion and fear, where respectable housewives become informants and saviors, and children become protectors and abusers.
A masterly display of bravura virtuosity, The Inventory is the final, terrible account of how all—old and young, affluent and destitute, the pampered and neglected—were transformed by oppression and tyranny. Proclaimed a classic in Germany, this unforgettable novel establishes Gila Lustiger as one of contemporary literature’s most important voices.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A series of loosely interlocking narrative snapshots tells the story of a small community of characters in Germany before, during and after WWII, where hero and villain alike fear and doubt what they do, and decisions made long before the war suddenly take on new significance. Ignoring his family's wishes, a Jewish man abandons his dentistry studies and opens a bookshop. When it is Aryanized and he is taken away to a camp, dentistry saves his life but crushes his soulDhe spends the war extracting the gold teeth of gassed prisoners. A German Christian who marries a wealthy Jewess for her money eventually converts to Judaism for her love, only to find his act of faith has placed his family in jeopardy. The fates of Polish nationalists, German homosexuals, criminals and the disabled are portrayed alongside those of Jews and Nazis. Wisely avoiding melodrama through the sheer cumulative weight of information, the novel is composed in studiously dispassionate prose, the characters little more than sketches. Part of a second generation of Holocaust writers, Lustiger is the daughter of a camp survivor who told her as a child that the numbers tattooed on his arm were his telephone number.
