Ladislav Grosman, The Shop on Main Street, trans. Iris Urwin Lewitová (Prague: Karolinum, 2019 [1964]), 150 pp.
Once again I’ve chosen a novel that pushes the boundaries of my mandate to read all “Slovak Novels in English.” In this case, the issue is equivocation on the term “Slovak.” The fact is, The Shop on Main Street was not written in the Slovak language at all… but in Czech, which is why it’s been issued in a series called Modern Czech Classics. Whether and to what extent Czech and Slovak are different languages has been a neuralgic issue for a long time, and even more so in the days when the two peoples shared a country. In any case, they are mutually intelligible to a degree that native English speakers can’t even imagine. However, I will not therefore conclude that I need to cover all Czech novels in English, too!
The more specific reason in favor of counting this one a “Slovak Novel in English” is the fact that the author was, in fact, a Slovak. Ladislav Grosman moved to Prague and adopted the local lingo to such an extent that it made sense to write first a short story, then a hybrid novel-screenplay, in Czech. Still, the story is set in Slovakia and all the characters are Slovak. So the novel passes my own personal litmus test.
As noted, the novel as it stands is a kind of hybrid with a screenplay of the kind written in the sixties. I found this detail to be quite illuminating, because the book as such is not the easiest read. It’s allusive, high-context, and underexplained. I had to read the final climax twice before I even realized that it was the final climax, much less what actually happened. I imagine that if you read it in the original language and knew the time and place, it would be that much more lucid.
However, for those of us with less extensive firsthand knowledge of Slovakia in the 1940s, we are blessed with one of the best film adaptations of all time, in which author Grosman was closely involved. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say the film is better than the prose text—a rare achievement indeed! My four-star rating here is really an average of three for the book and five for the film. The social and psychological subtleties track much better on the screen, not to mention the huge advantage of seeing the details of the setting, and absolutely spot-on acting. It’s clear why this was the first Czechoslovak film to win the Academy Award for foreign film. Again, to note the strange coexistence of Czech and Slovak, the opening titles are in Czech, but all the dialogue is in Slovak, with a bit of Yiddish thrown in. (You can watch the whole thing on YouTube with English subtitles.)
The story tracks one Tono Brtko, a carpenter with little money or prospects and a wife, Eveline, who perpetually resents him on that account. Good news appears on their doorstop in the form of Eveline’s estranged sister and her husband, who is an officer in the Hlinka Guard—fascist police collaborating with the Nazis in the Slovak puppet state of the late 30s and early 40s. He comes to make amends by awarding Brtko the license to “Aryanize” the notions shop belonging to an aged Jewish woman, Mrs. Lautmann. (NB: In the film “Aryanizer” is translated in the subtitles as “Arisator,” which is closer to the Slovak term but otherwise unintelligible to English speakers. The novel translation uses “Aryanizer.”) Eveline is thrilled at the prospect of getting their hands on not just the shop’s income but the presumed riches stowed away by a miserly old Jew. Brtko is a little less certain: a classic Everyman, he doesn’t understand what’s unfolding around him, and can only follow his moral and human instincts, sometimes in the direction of greed, sometimes in the direction of compassion.
All of this is based on real conditions on the ground in Slovakia at the time. In America we tend to start, mentally, with the trains deporting Jews to concentration camps, but even Everymen might balk at that. The way for the mass extermination of Jews was paved by first making them class enemies, and then methodically depriving them of their property. Poor people with few prospects anyway found it all too easy to resent and suspect anyone who was doing better financially, and Jews often did do better financially, running small businesses. It was so easy to tap into that resentment with a presumed righteous program of redistributing the inequitable wealth. Then, once the Jews had been deprived of their livelihood, the next move was made to call them parasites who contributed nothing to society. The final stage was to deport them. Slovaks were told that they were being sent to work camps, to force them to become productive members of society instead of mooching off the peasant populace. Needless to say, that was not the case.
Krtko, not Brtko
What The Shop on Main Street depicts so well is both the jealous resentment turning into a sense of entitlement among the non-Jewish Slovak population, and at the same time how entangled the lives of the various peoples were with one another. In a small town, they all knew each other, bought each other’s goods, used each other’s services, and managed fine. Gradually you come to realize how many Jews Brtko knows personally, and what other Gentiles have helped looked after them. It’s particularly poignant that Mrs. Lautmann, who owns the shop that Brtko has been given charge of, is not a remarkable figure one way or another. She’s not heroic or young, or corrupt and vicious, and certainly not rich. She’s just a very old and nearly deaf widow who treats Brtko like a friendly volunteer. She cooks for him and gives him advice. Most endearingly, she mishears his name and calls him Krtko, which is Slovak for “little mole,” and incidentally the name of the most popular cartoon character to come out of Czechoslovakia. Eveline’s constant pressure on Brtko to extract all he can out of Mrs. Lautmann’s shop becomes all the more odious as you grow to love this oblivious granny.
I won’t spoil the ending for you, only say that it richly repays the premise. Instead I’ll wrap up expressing the same uneasiness I have felt before at communist-era fiction on the Nazi period. Because yes, absolutely, the evils of that right-wing regime must never be forgotten. But the motivation of the left-wing regime that succeeded it for dwelling on them was to distract attention from its own evils. The Soviet bloc was also profoundly anti-Semitic and acted on its hatred. The Soviet bloc also named people class enemies and deprived them of their property and livelihood. I felt not a little outrage at the open critique of using legal processes to commit injustice being laid at the feet of the Nazis, as if the Communists didn’t do precisely the same, and ultimately to far more people. The movie version even manages to get in a little dig at the Slovak desire for greater autonomy vis-à-vis the Czech Lands, associating it with Nazism.
On the other hand, the book and movie come from the mid-sixties, when the thaw that would lead to the Prague Spring began. Perhaps it’s precisely because the locus of blame was shifted to the Nazis that Grosman could explore at all a topic that otherwise would have been too explosive to bring to the screen, and viewers could infer what they would from it.
I suspect that ultimately Grosman took the measure of the Communists and found them just as dangerous as the Nazis. He himself was a Jew (like the Jewish characters in the story, he has a Germanic/Yiddish surname) and counted himself among the decimated Jewish population of postwar Czechoslovakia. But when the Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, Grosman got out. He emigrated to Israel and spent the rest of his days there. It doesn’t finally matter whether it’s on the left or on the right: one totalizing regime is just as bad as the other.
