Ladislav Grosman, The Bride, trans. Iris Urwin (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 113 pp.
This is my second review of a work by Grosman, and one of a by-now not-insignificant number of Slovak novels not actually composed in Slovak.
Grosman was Slovak, and that was his primary language; moreover, as in The Shop on Main Street, the novel (or really novella—at 113 pp. and print the size of a YA novel from the 70s, I’d bet it’s not much over 20,000 words in length) is set in eastern Slovakia. Grosman’s adult career as a writer and film producer took place in Prague, however, where Czech was naturally the language of choice.
However, Grosman was not in residence in Prague when this novel was first published in the original language. The year of publication was 1969, but the year before was the Prague Spring, followed by the Warsaw Pact invasion. In addition to the widespread repression of all the peoples of Czechoslovakia, Grosman rightly counted on the profound anti-Semitism of communist regimes under the aegis of Soviet Russia. He and his family fled to Israel and settled there.
Much like The Shop on Main Street, this novel too deals with the period of Nazi control over Czechoslovakia, in particular the Nazi puppet state that governed a Slovakia detached from its Czech partner in the late 30s. While the previous novel dealt with the Aryanization of businesses, this one deals with an order requiring all unmarried Jewish women over the age of 16 to “register,” eventually to be “sent to labor camps,” which were not labor camps at all, as you might well infer.
This disastrous development in law elicits very different reactions from the Jews in the village. The titular bride, Liza, probably more than 25 years old by now, is sick to death of being hounded to find a husband, struggling to maintain her dignity and independence from the public shame while concealing her inward loneliness. The men in her family scheme to get her (and eventually a lot of other Jewish teen girls) to go through with first a civil, and then a religious, wedding just to tick off the “married” box and protect her. But for Liza, it’s a dream come true: she’s going to get her husband after all, and on her own terms. She schemes step by step to make her fake wedding into a real one, her sham husband into the genuine article.
You might expect a happy ending brought about ironically with this kind of setup. As Dara Horn points out in People Love Dead Jews, however, a tidy ending to a Holocaust tale is popular, but hardly authentic. More than that, Horn argues, the complete story arc has more to do with a Christian biblical sensibility than a Jewish one. The Bride stops, but it doesn’t really end, and why it stops where it does, or what it even means, is anything but clear.