Böcker av Jean-Claude Grumberg

For readers of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Book Thief, Jean-Claude Grumberg's haunting fable, an enormous bestseller in his native France, tells a story of the Holocaust and the remarkable acts of kindness of which people are capable.

Winner of seven Molieres, 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.

This important drama was named best play of the 1979 Paris season and has subsequently moved audiences throughout the world with its simple story about seamstresses struggling to recover from the aftermath of World War II. The central character struggles to keep herself and her two sons alive while she waits for word about her husband who was deported to a concentration camp. Her heroism and determination are especially poignant, for she is a portrait of the playwright's mother. There is an evocative balance of humor and pathos in this excellent play, as well as a number of fine monologues and six excellent female roles.