Redemption

Redemption is awash with brutal truths, rude awakenings and painful self-discoveries. Gorenstein doesn't make it easy for his reader: His forbidding theme is the aftermath of the Holocaust — the aftershock of 'ineluctable, planned murder' — and his protagonist is an unsympathetic young woman. But the darkness is not total; there are numerous glints of light, even pockets of beauty. Gorenstein skillfully crafts scenes, paints landscapes and conveys moods. We move from the shabby elegance of the ball to the snowy streets with their burned-out ruins. We watch with morbid fascination as Sashenka inflicts damage on others and then herself. Punctuating her many trials and errors are searching meditations on suffering and salvation, love and fate. -- Malcolm Forbes * Star Tribune *
Set immediately after World War II in a Soviet town emerging from German occupation, Friedrich Gorenstein’s Redemption is a small masterpiece of post-Holocaust fiction. Vividly translated by Andrew Bromfield, this is a gripping book—full of searing psychological portraits threaded across intersecting social, political, and historical microcosms. Redemption startles the reader with its emotionally and philosophically vivid account of sex and violence and the strange horizons of love. -- Val Vinokur, The New School
Bromfield’s translation of Gorenstein’s Redemption peels away the layers of the still underexamined archive of the Holocaust in the USSR. In the immediate aftermath of the war with Nazi Germany, denizens of a town in Soviet Ukraine begin to face the consequences of the wartime treatment of their Jewish neighbors. Official documents and witness reports crowd in on personal recollections of perpetrators, survivors, and their progeny in a narrative that shifts between stylistic registers as it challenges the contours of collective memory and individual responsibility. I’m thrilled that this work by an important Russian author is now available to the English-language reader. -- Sasha Senderovich, University of Washington, Seattle
A master of episodic narration. . . . Gorenstein also proves to be a keen observer and radically critical chronicler of Soviet society. -- Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Told honestly but philosophically, this is the story of two young people’s love in the aftermath of World War II, as some traumas were healing and others were only beginning, laying bare the underacknowledged Holocaust in the USSR. * World Literature Today *
The cast of Redemption is destitute, traumatized, and beset by a restless police apparatus hunting out wartime collaborators. They are constitutionally unfit to bring new life into the world — yet they do: securing food and heat, having parties, making babies, and burying the dead. All of it, the book argues, is the result of ineluctable forces — biological, tectonic, geothermal — rather than proof of any spiritual or ideological purpose. The countless victims of the war have not been redeemed by the living; their murders won’t be paid back. Indeed, the novel’s beauty and its truth rest on the knowledge that redemption is inconceivable and that life persists in its absence. -- Leeore Schnairsohn * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Friedrich Gorenstein (1932-2002) is a major figure in the history of 20th-century Russian literature—and a most curious one. On the one hand, his novels blend fiction with religion, philosophy, and politics in a way that is quintessentially Russian, reminiscent of writers from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Chekhov and, in the 20th century, Andrei Platonov. On the other hand, throughout his voluminous body of work, he defiantly tackles those selfsame issues as a Jewish writer, a Jewish thinker, and an uncompromising Jewish voice. . . . The power of Gorenstein’s writing lies in the fact that his weighty, nuanced, and idiosyncratic political and religious imagination is channeled through a spellbinding lyrical style. -- Marat Grinberg * Mosaic *