The Most Precious of Cargoes
Page 5
No, we know nothing, or at least I personally have heard nothing about the success or failure of this attempt by the former father of twins. We therefore do not know, and we will never know, whether or not he was finally reunited with his daughter.
Epilogue
There. Now you know everything. Sorry? Another question? You want to know if this is a true story? A true story? Of course not, absolutely not. There were no cargo trains crossing war-torn continents to deliver urgently their oh-so-perishable cargo. No reunification camps, internment camps, concentration camps, or even extermination camps. No families were vaporized in smoke after their final journey. No hair was shorn, gathered, packaged, and shipped. There were no flames, no ashes, no tears. None of this, none of this happened, none of this is true. Any more than the poor woodcutter’s wife and her poor woodcutter husband, any more than the heartless and the hunters of the heartless. None of this, none of this is true. Not the liberation of the towns and the fields, the forests and the camps, which never existed. Nor the years that followed that liberation. Not the grief of fathers and mothers searching for their missing children. Not even the fringed prayer shawls woven from gold and silver threads. Not the man with the goat and the shattered face, nor the man who wore a moleskin hat—thanks be to God, if indeed He still exists!—the man who wore a mole that had been disemboweled and turned inside out to make a hat. None of this, none of this is true. Not the poor woodcutter’s ax, the ax that sliced the mole in two before dispatching the two wretched militiamen, hunters of the heartless.
None of this, none of this is true.
The one thing that is true, genuinely true—or deserves to be in the context of this story, because there must be a grain of truth in any story, otherwise why sweat blood to tell it—the one true thing, truly true, is that a little girl—who did not exist—was thrown from the window of a cargo train, out of love and out of despair, was thrown from a train, wrapped in a fringed prayer shawl embroidered with gold and silver thread—a prayer shawl that did not exist—was tossed into the snow at the feet of a poor woodcutter’s wife with no children to treasure, and that this poor woodcutter’s wife—who did not exist—gathered her up, fed her, treasured her, and loved her more than anything. More than life itself. There.
Appendix for Lovers of True Stories
Convoy 45 left Drancy on November 11, 1942, with 778 men, women, and children aboard, many of them elderly and infirm, among them a blind man, Naphtali Grumberg, the author’s grandfather.
Two survivors in 1945.
Convoy 49 set off on March 2, 1943, carrying 1,000 Jews, including Zacharie Grumberg, the author’s father, and Sylvia Menkès, born on March 4, 1942, and gassed on March 4, 1943, the anniversary of her birth.
The Memorial to the Deportation of Jews from France, set down in 1978 by Serge Klarsfeld from the alphabetical lists of Jews deported from France, serves for many of us, children of the déportés, as a family vault. According to the book, Abraham and Chaja Wiesenfeld and their twin girls, Fernande and Jeannine, born in the tenth arrondissement of Paris on November 9, 1943, deported Drancy on December 7 of that same year, twenty-eight days after their birth, on Convoy 64 (see Klarsfeld, op. cit.).
A Note from the Translator
The Most Precious of Cargoes is a fable so delicate yet so harrowing that when I began my translation, I was terrified I would break the spell. Translation is never simply a matter of words; it is about listening for voice, being attentive to cadence and to rhythm, to the silences between words. From the horrors of war, Jean-Claude Grumberg has woven a fable as beautiful and intricate as the prayer shawl at the heart of the story, fine threads of allegory and history, of love and devastating loss. In translating it, I have endeavored to preserve its simplicity and its jarring beauty, braiding the leitmotifs of fairy tale and fable as they play out in the omnipresent shadow of the Shoah. Theodor Adorno famously said, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” but out of his own grief Jean-Claude Grumberg has fashioned something lyrical and beautiful from the ashes.
—Frank Wynne
Here ends Jean-Claude Grumberg’s
The Most Precious of Cargoes.
The first edition of this book was printed and bound at LSC Communications in Harrisonburg, Virginia, July 2020.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this novel was set in ITC Legacy Serif, a typeface designed by Ronald Arnholm in the early 1990s. Arnholm, then a graduate student at Yale, drew inspiration from Nicolas Jenson’s (1420–1480) early Roman typefaces. ITC Legacy maintains the beauty and elegance of Jenson’s original, while improving legibility with its open counters and clean character shapes.
An imprint dedicated to publishing international voices, offering readers a chance to encounter other lives and other points of view via the language of the imagination.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE MOST PRECIOUS OF CARGOES. Copyright © 2020 by Jean-Claude Grumberg. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
Digital Edition AUGUST 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-298181-3
Version 08182020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-298179-0
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