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'A magnificent small book to read urgently' Liberation Once upon a
time in an enormous forest there lived a poor woodcutter and his
wife. Around them a war wages, and hunger is a constant companion.
Yet every night, the woodcutter's wife prays for a child. On a
train crossing the forest, a Jewish father holds his twin children.
His wife no longer has enough milk to feed them. In hopes of saving
both their lives, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and gently
throws her from the train. While foraging for food, the
woodcutter's wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl.
She knows that this little girl will be pursued, but she cannot
ignore this gift: she will accept the precious cargo, and raise her
as her own. . . Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told
with a fairytale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes,
translated from French by Frank Wynne, is a deeply moving fable
about family and redemption, a story that reminds us that humanity
can be found in the most inhumane of places.
Winner of seven Molières, the Pulitzer Prize of France,
Jean-Claude Grumberg is one of France’s leading dramatists and a
distinguished voice of modern European Jewry after the Shoah. His
success in portraying contemporary Parisian Jews on the stage
represents a new development in European theater and a new
aesthetic expression of European Jewish experience and sensibility
of the Holocaust and its aftermath, a perspective quite different
from either the American or the Israeli one. Grumberg’s Jews are
French to their fingertips, yet they have been made more
consciously Jewish by the war and the difficulties of reintegrating
into a society in which too many neighbors denounced them or
ignored their pleas to save their children. Affirming the new
status of Jewish culture, Grumberg’s plays insist on the
recognition of Jewish identity and uniqueness within the majority
societies of Europe. This volume offers the first English
translation of three of Grumberg’s prize-winning plays: The
Workplace (L’Atelier, 1979), On the Way to the Promised Land
(Vers toi Terre promise, 2006) and Mama’s Coming Back, Poor
Orphan (Maman revient, pauvre orphelin, 1994). Presented in the
order of the history they record and steeped in Grumberg’s
personal experience and insights into contemporary Parisian life,
these plays serve as documentary witnesses that begin with the
immediate postwar reality and continue up to the end of the
twentieth century. Seth Wolitz provides notes on the plays’
themes, structures, characters, and settings, along with an
introduction that discusses Grumberg’s place within the emergence
of French-Jewish drama and a translation of an interview with the
playwright himself.
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