Cesta pouští – Kraus Ota B. (2014)

Despite the indelible burden of the Holocaust during World War II, the often-overlooked Czech-Israeli writer Ota B. Kraus (1921 Prague – 2000 Netanya) managed to write a novel in which these events serve primarily as a historical context for the main character, a teenage Jewish boy named Štěpán. The horrors of the Holocaust, which both Kraus and his later wife Dita, the 'Auschwitz librarian,' experienced, remain merely a shadow that underscores the oppressive atmosphere of the time in which Štěpán comes of age. Kraus's novel is a sensitive and evocative testimony about a young man whose search for first loves, his own Czech-Jewish identity, as well as his relationship with work, parents, and the defining ideologies of the 20th century (Marxism, Zionism) is both painfully and beautifully Ortenesque. Štěpán is expelled from high school due to his heritage, and later, before the occupation, he flees to Soviet Russia, where he quickly sobers up from his socially utopian dreams and the insurmountable barriers between home and foreign lands. He returns to the Protectorate, where the advancing repression leads him to work on a farm in Central Bohemia. Agriculture emerges as a motif that is almost ruralist-Zionist (Palestine), yet the depiction is very attractive and mysterious: on the farm...