The half-life of a refugee

A wartime child refugee from Poland, and fostered into a Swedish family, Lars Andemening is living a half-life. Now middle-aged, he is the survivor of two failed marriages and writes nondescript book reviews for one of his adopted country’s daily papers. His star is easily outshone, and left with little on which to hang his identity, he uses his orphaned status to conjure a past worth owning.

His father, he decides, was the legendary Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, one of the greatest prose stylists of the 20th century, who was murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942. Quickly then, this obsession consumes Lars, to the point where he even learns Polish in order to be able to read his “father’s” work in its original form. But there is one gaping hole in the picture: a decades-lost and almost mythical novel, ‘The Messiah’, that Schulz had been working on at the time of his death.

Lars has one rather strange friend, a bookshop owner, Heidi Eklund, and it is Heidi who facilitates this novel’s captivating plot. One day, an oddly familiar-looking woman named Adela, who claims to be Schulz’s daughter, brings to the bookshop a manuscript of what she insists is the only surviving copy of ‘The Messiah’. From here, the questions build. What is real and what is right? Who, if anyone, is conning who, and why?

At 85 years old, Cynthia Ozick has enjoyed a glittering career. Her novels, essays and, in particular, her short stories have earned rapturous acclaim from critics, peers and prize committees, and she is frequently acknowledged as one of America’s greatest writers. Considered sentence by crackling sentence, she has few equals. Yet, in terms of the sheer scope of her talent, she remains essentially under-appreciated.

First published in the mid-’80s, The Messiah of Stockholm is a short but masterful novel that brings into question the shades of reality, the effects of displacement on the psyche, the balancing of — and interaction between — life and art, and an innate need for recognition of the self.

Miss Ozick has spent a career pondering the survival mechanisms and borne scars of the post-Holocaust diaspora. What she presents here is a work of intense imagination, quite possibly her lifetime’s best, one that demonstrates all of her linguistic gifts and manages, with an admirable sleight of hand, to expose the absurdly Kafkaesque underbelly lurking beneath even the most mundane of existences.

The subjects broached echo with allegorical implication, but can be just as easily and happily enjoyed as a piece of alluring fantasy. This long-overdue reissuing has given a truly fine book another chance to breathe.