Customer Reviews

Soul of Wood (New York Review Books)

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Franz Kafka said, "What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide."

A book has done that, and it is Jakov Lind's _Soul of Wood_.

Perhaps it was Lind's extraordinary past that produced such extraordinary work: the boy was separated from his parents-- who emigrated to Palestine-- after the Nazis annexed Austria, and he went into hiding in Holland. He took on many identities throughout his life, and even worked for the SS. He moved to London, befriended Canetti, and then wrote in English, lamenting his loss of German and European culture. Stefan Zweig's suicide, which forever separated him from his homeland, comes to mind.

I cannot put into words, at least not ones that rival Kafka's above, about how Lind's stories have touched me. They do, to be sure, affect me in a similar way as those of Kafka's absurdist works; I see Lind as a post-war Kafka, someone fully familiar with the chaos of the world and the ability to render it into almost perfect representational art. Lind's symbols, even ones as insane as a paralytic Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis at the top of an Austrian mountain with the help of a crippled WWI veteran (this is the background of the title story), will hopefully remain as prevalent as Kafka's human-turned-creature Gregor Samsa.