WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE CAUGHT WITH AN UNOPENED UMBRELLA IN THE POURING RAIN
In this unforgettable collection of Romanian short stories, we're bound to recognize ourselves and our foibles, while also realizing how much we take for granted.
Gifted to me by Rita and Alfred (Freddy) Bruckstein during my trip to Israel, this book was written by Freddy’s father, the late Ludovic Bruckstein. The Brucksteins told me very little about the book and the author when they gave it to me.
The cover of With An Unopened Umbrella In The Pouring Rain is arresting. The book’s title is quaint. Upon reading each story in this exquisitely narrated (and illustrated) collection, I aver that the title of this Romanian book could not be more appropriate. Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, every story describes a moment in which all the preparation in the life of a human being is rendered null and void by the course of world events.
The larger narrative of this collection is also the tale of the Bruckstein family. Most of the stories in With An Unopened Umbrella In The Pouring Rain take place in a town called Sighet, a town that became part of Romania after the first World War. Along with about 13, 000 people in Sighet, Ludovic Bruckstein, his siblings and his parents were packed off to Auschwitz in cattle train transports. Most were gassed upon arrival. A few were picked to work in different parts of the concentration camp. While the rest of their family was murdered, Ludovic and his brother were assigned to work in forced labor camps.
Many people died in the terrible conditions inside these labor camps but the brothers survived and returned home to Sighet after the war only to have to come to terms with the vacuousness of their lives.
When Ludovic Bruckstein finally did pass away in 1988 at 68 years of age, the World Wide Web was still a couple of years away. I wondered if this might explain why there were not enough references online to a writer of this caliber. I was astonished by what I learned later from Freddy and Rita.
When he emigrated to Israel in 1972, Bruckstein’s name was erased from the records of what was then communist Romania. Despite the national accolades he received as a man of letters, Ludovic Bruckstein was called a traitor and hence his name was not mentioned in the annals of Romanian literature. In his adoptive nation, however, the author has been featured in all the lists celebrating Jewish writers and thinkers.
Following the publication by Istros Books of two of Bruckstein’s books (The Trap in 2019, and With An Unopened Umbrella In The Pouring Rain in 2021), the world of English now has the opportunity to read him. During his years in Romania, Bruckstein was awarded the V. Alecsandri prize, The Writers’ Union prize, the prestigious Collectivization medal, and the Order of Labor which is considered to be one of the highest distinctions of the Romanian state. While The Night Shift, a Yiddish play he wrote about a Sonderkommando revolt in the Auschwitz concentration camp brought him fame and attention, the politics of his country of birth would collide with his writing life and his personal life.
All the stories in the book have the same underlying theme, that large world events may, at any time, radically alter the course of our small lives. Sighet is a cozy community with people who, as in every other small town or village, are nosy, kind, unkind, lazy, hardworking and blunt as any other people anywhere in the world. The people of Sighet go about their daily lives preoccupied by the vicissitudes of their family lives.
Bruckstein captures the details of their humdrum lives in prose that sparkles with wit and irony. He is a writer of uncommon sensitivity, one who sees the droll in the tragic and the poignant in the funny, and artfully weaves his powers of observation into his fiction.
In his first story, Bruckstein makes it clear that he takes pleasure in writing about everyday people. It’s the staging of the small, supposedly irrelevant, factoids that make us feel that we’re reading a classic.
Schmiel the Blacksmith was as short, well-built man with hair as black as pitch, cropped short beneath a greasy cap, with a tangled black beard that framed a toil-worn face. The skin of his face was like parchment, yellow, leathery, scored by deep wrinkles, covered in soot, so much so that it looked as if it had been drawn in ink by a master’s hand. The soot never left those wrinkles, even though every Friday afternoon Schmiel went to the mikve, the communal bath, where he first entered the sauna, climbing to the highest bench and mercilessly lashing himself with the whisk, after which he went to the pool, where he thrice immersed himself before climbing back out, his soul clean, lighter and at peace.
By the time we hurtle to the end of this story, Schmiel’s appearance has changed almost radically. This blacksmith has been loaded onto a train bound for Auschwitz. The man who once had hair “black as pitch” is unrecognizable. His hair is white now for reasons that we understand all too well. The closing paragraph of Bruckstein’s first story is loaded with meaning now, especially as we recall how Schmiel once used to look.
Schmiel was wearing his Sabbath clothes, his long grey overcoat, brushed to a sheen, his wide-brimmed black hat, and tucked under his arm he carried the umbrella he had received as a gift from Hana, his most beautiful daughter. He was white. His hair had turned white in the synagogue overnight, his face was as white as chalk, his wrinkles were still caked with the soot that never came out, although every Friday he took a sauna and then thrice plunged into the mikva water. He looked like a drawing in black ink, made by the hand of a master on chalk paper.
Throughout this book Bruckstein paints the lives of human beings caught unawares. The characters run the gamut—goodhearted curmudgeons, a harried doctor, rabbis, misers, clean freaks, sluggards, bums, and, of course, good samaritans.
The Jews were rounded up from their one hundred and twenty houses and herded into the tradesmen’s synagogue, where they sat huddled on the floor the whole night, their knees to their mouths, and the next morning they were taken to the goods ramp of Sighet station, loaded onto freight cars with planks and barbed wire nailed over the ventilation windows and heavy padlocks on the doors, and they were sent to Auschwitz.
The whole point of this thirteen story collection is contained in the eponymous opening tale. All of us go about our lives assuming that we have control over our existence. Yet we don’t.
In a story titled Matriarchy that hit very close to home, a stringent neat-freak mother, Relly Dreispan, heckles her husband and son over cleanliness in the home. She won’t allow them to step on the carpet with their shoes on. She is always wiping up after them. She won’t ever allow them in one of the rooms.
And every morning Relly would emerge from therein, with her broom and duster; she would lock the door behind her and heave a deep sigh: “At least let me keep this room clean.”
On 16 May 1944, two gendarmes with cockerel feathers in their caps, armed with heavy carbies and cartridge belts, entered the Dreispan family home, wearing their big boots, polished in regulation fashion, heedless of the slippers by the front door.
We meet skinflint Avram Eizicovitch in a story called Three Rolls For a Penny. In his entire life Avram “had never set foot in a restaurant or a bodega or a public house, dapper, smiling waiters had not served him, but rather he had eaten three stale penny rolls instead of one fresh, crusty roll.” One day, while he’s eating his stale roll while standing in front of a store called Elegant Haberdashery, he tries to take a bite of the hard roll. When it snaps in his mouth, Avram’s elbow hits the store window and shatters it. Avram, the miser, is not one to pay for anything that is technically not his. Hours later, he buys the whole building. “Only then had it suited him to pay for the repairs. It was now his house.”
One fateful day in May 1944, the man who never wanted to part with his money must part from his sons. “And Avram Eizicovitch went in the direction he was pointed, he went with his sons, who didn’t want to part with their father, he went without understanding a thing, not a single thing.” On the day of reckoning, however, Avram—who prided himself on calculations and kept a dog-eared grey notebook, full of figures, symbols, and sums intelligible to him alone and “knew exactly what he owned, how much he owned, where he owned it”—follows the crowd, strangely enough, without understanding a thing.
I’m incredulous that the creator of all these characters actually mustered up the will power to overcome his own unspeakable sorrows. How does someone transcend that darkness and create great art, writing stories bursting with people, humor and bonhomie?
What a wonderful review of what looks to be a truly remarkable book! I will definitely get this and read it. The illustrations were a world unto themselves. Thank you!
That illustration of the paper cut out of the straight up man, that crumbles with the folds into a broken shadow of the former self, is unbelievable! How much the son, as illustrator, understood of what his father was conveying and went beyond it! You are truly lucky to have received this book as a gift and we are luckier since you shared it!