Margarita Khemlin
Auteur de Klotsvog (Russian Library)
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Margarita Khemlin
Oeuvres associées
Read Russia!: An Anthology of New Voices — Contributeur — 14 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Khemlin, Margarita
- Nom légal
- Хемлин, Маргарита Михайловна
Khemlin, Margarita Mikhailovna - Date de naissance
- 1960-07-06
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Russia
- Lieu de naissance
- Chernigov, USSR
- Études
- Maxim Gorky Literature Institute
Membres
Critiques
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 5
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 56
- Popularité
- #291,557
- Évaluation
- 3.9
- Critiques
- 6
- ISBN
- 13
- Langues
- 4
Klotsvog, with its unprepossessing title, is subtitled Notes from the Jewish Underground but its portrayal of secular Jewish life is confined to the mental landscape of its central character, the narrator Maya. Like a Soviet version of Becky Sharp from Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-8), Maya is on a quest to better herself. In the Stalinist USSR, upgrading from cramped and overcrowded housing becomes an all-consuming quest for Maya who engineers successive relationships to achieve an apartment of her own by the novel's end.
Like Becky, Maya is shallow, selfish, manipulative and cruel, but unlike Becky, her motivation is not merely materialistic. As noted in the Foreword by Lara Vapynya, Khemlin, the catalyst for her outrageous behaviour is fear.
Maya, like all the secular Jewish characters in her milieu, lost most of her family when they perished under the German Occupation of Ukraine during WW2. She and her mother survived through 'the evacuation' (the mass migration of 16 million western Soviet citizens to the east) during the Soviet retreat. They were among about 1.5 million East European Jews—mostly from Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia—who, in contrast to near annihilation of the Jews in the rest of German occupied Europe, survived behind the lines. Wikipedia tells us, however, that in the postwar era, Stalin reignited anti-Semitism, with campaigns against 'rootless cosmopolitans' (i.e. Zionists), among whom were writers and intellectuals arrested for 'espionage' and 'treason' beginning in 1948 and culminating with the Night of the Murdered Poets.
The surviving fragments of the Jewish community had good reason to fear a Soviet version of Hitler's Final Solution, and they were also haunted by the long history of pogroms in Ukraine, Poland and Russia. In the novel, Maya—who gradually becomes aware of how her suppressed Jewish identity impacts on her life—thinks that catastrophe is inevitable. She determines to live as well as she can in the meantime.
Khemlin, as I said, is a subtle author, and Maya, as I said, is shallow. So with only occasional insights into Maya's mental landscape of fear, the novel romps through her energetic efforts to improve her lot while she awaits her fate.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/08/08/klotsvog-by-margarita-khemlin-translated-by-...… (plus d'informations)