Bøger af Jean-Claude Grumberg

DET DYREBARESTE STYKKE JERNBANEGODS er et eventyr for voksne og større børn. Et eventyr, der her i 75-året for befrielsen af Auschwitz slår til lyd for større tolerance mellem mennesker og alle menneskers ret til at leve – skrevet med lune midt i alle grusomhederne og i en anden form, end vi er vant til. Under anden verdenskrig er et godstog med deporterede franske jøder på vej mod en grusom skæbne, da faderen til et par nyfødte tvillinger i afmagt beslutter at kaste den ene tvilling ud fra toget. En beslutning, der bliver ved at hjemsøge ham, men barnet, det lille stykke jernbanegods, bliver opfostret af et fattigt skovhuggerpar, som kommer til at elske det over alt på jorden. Bogen har siden januar 2019 solgt over 73.000 eksemplarer i Frankring.

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.

Set during the height of World War II, a powerful and unsettling tale about a woodcutter and his wife, who finds a mysterious parcel thrown from a passing train.Once upon a time in an enormous forest lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child.A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and throws her into the forest.While foraging for food, the wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl. Although she knows harboring this baby could lead to her death, she takes the child home.Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told with a fairytale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes is a fable about family and redemption which reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places.

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.