LIND, Jakov

Pseudonym for Heinz Landwirth. Nationality: Austrian. Born: Vienna, 10 February 1927; took name Jakov Chaklan in Palestine after World War II. Education: Academy of Dramatic Art, Vienna. Family: Married Faith Henry in 1955 (divorced), two children. Career: Fled Germany to the Netherlands in 1938, fled back to Germany in 1943 with false identity papers and worked as a deckhand on a river barge; immigrated to Palestine after World War II and worked as a laborer, actor, and editor; since 1956 has lived mainly in London. Writer-in-residence, Long Island University Brooklyn Center, 1966-67.

Publication

Novels

Landschaft in Beton. 1963; as Landscape in Concrete, 1966.

Eine bessere Welt. 1966; as Ergo, 1966.

Travels to the Enu: The Story of a Shipwreck (novella). 1982.

The Inventor. 1987.

Memoirs

Counting My Steps: An Autobiography. 1969.

The Trip to Jerusalem. 1972.

Numbers: A Further Autobiography. 1973.

Crossing: The Discovery of Two Islands. 1991.

Short Stories

Eine Seele aus Holz. 1962; as Soul of Wood and Other Stories, 1964.

Der Ofen: Eine Erzählung und sieben Legenden. 1973; as The Stove: Short Stories, 1983.

Plays

Anna Laub (radio play). 1965.

Die Heiden: Spiek in 3 Akten or Das Sterben der Silberfüchse (radio play). 1965.

The Silver Foxes Are Dead, and Other Plays (English translations, includes the radio plays The Silver Foxes Are Dead; Anna Laub; Hunger; Fear ). 1968.

Angst und Hunger: Zwei Hörspiele [Fear and Hunger: Two Radio Plays]. 1968. Ergo,

from his novel (produced New York, 1968). 1968.

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Critical Studies:

"Jakov Lind: Writer at Crossroads" by Stella P. Rosenfeld, in Modern Austrian Literature: Journal of the International Arthur Schnitzler Research Association, 4(4), 1971, pp. 42-47; "Conscience and Cannibals: An Essay on Two Exemplary Tales: 'Soul of Wood' and 'The Pawnbroker"' by Stephen Karpowitz, in Psychoanalytic Review, 64, 1977, pp. 41-62; "Jakov Lind's War: Guilt and Identity in the Autobiographical Works and Early Stories" by Kathleen Thorpe, in Acta Germanica: Jahrbuch des Germanistenverbandes im sudlichen Afrika (Germany), 23, 1995, pp. 107-15; Jakov Lind: The Cosmopolitan Austrian, 2000, and Writing after Hitler: The Work of Jakov Lind, 2001, both edited by Edward Timms, Andrea Hammel and Silke Hassler.

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Jakov Lind was born in Vienna, Austria, the only son of a Jewish family of Eastern European descent. In 1938 a refugee organization brought him and his sister to The Netherlands, where they stayed with various foster families. Following the German occupation of The Netherlands in 1942, Lind was moved to the Amsterdam ghetto. He escaped deportation and, after assuming the identity of a fictitious young Dutchman, hid out in Nazi Germany. There he first worked as a sailor on a large Rhine barge and later as an assistant to the director of a metallurgical institute. After the war Lind joined his family in Palestine, where he worked at various jobs including construction worker, photographer, and air traffic controller for the new Israeli air force. In 1950 Lind returned to Austria to study directing for a semester at the Reinhardt-Institute. After short stays in Paris, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, Lind settled in London in 1954. His literary output includes novels, short stories, autobiographical works, and plays for theater and radio. In addition to his work as a writer, Lind has directed films. He is also an accomplished painter whose work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States.

Lind's literary work clearly shows the imprint of his traumatic experiences during the Holocaust. Nazi terror, war, and survival emerge as central themes especially in his early writings, which include the prose collection Soul of Wood (1962) and the novels Landscape in Concrete (1963) and Ergo (1966). Set during the Nazi period, these texts examine human behavior in the face of life-threatening circumstances. Through the use of the literary grotesque, Lind creates an absurd, nightmarish, and unpredictable world in which fear and guilt are the primary human experiences.

His preoccupation with his own personal history remains evident in Lind's later works. His autobiography Counting My Steps (1969) recounts his childhood in Vienna, the years in The Netherlands, and his fight for survival in Nazi Germany. The author poignantly reveals loss of identity, cultural alienation, and survivor guilt as the price of survival. The exploration of what it means to be Jewish underlies Lind's text The Trip to Jerusalem (1972). In this work, written in the style of New Journalism, Lind describes his experiences, observations, and impressions during a four-week trip to Israel. His solidarity with the country does not prohibit a critical depiction that is accompanied by a critical examination of the self. In 1973 Lind published the second installment of his autobiography, entitled Numbers: A Further Autobiography. A chronological continuation of Counting My Steps, the work covers Lind's return to Europe and his time in Austria. While focusing on day-today encounters, the author relives essential experiences of his past as he tries to come to terms with fascism. The third installment of his autobiography, Crossing: The Discovery of Two Islands, appeared in 1991. The work describes Lind's life in England, his marriage to Faith Henry, and his emerging career as a writer. As with his previous autobiographical works, Crossing testifies to Lind's continuing preoccupation with fascism and his own role as a survivor of the Holocaust.

Lind published three literary texts between the second and third installments of his autobiography. The first, a prose collection entitled The Stove, appeared in 1973, in German, although it was originally written in English. The rich symbolism of the stories, and in particular of the title story about a stove business that evokes associations with Auschwitz, allows them to be read on multiple levels. After a nine-year hiatus, Lind published his novel Travels to the Enu in 1982. In this satiric adventure-travel novel, the protagonist, a writer named Orlando, is confronted with two types of society, one violent and totalitarian, the other exotic and utopian. The exotic world turns out to be just a mirror image of the unsatisfying reality that had prompted Orlando's trip. In the many discursive passages that interrupt the novel's turbulent story line, Orlando reflects critically on societal structures, war, and disarmament. The Inventor (1987) is an epistolary novel. It tells the story of the Jewish brothers Emmanuel and Boris Borovsky. While Boris's letters document his deteriorating marriage, Emmanuel's relate his difficulties finding financial supporters for his invention. In ways similar to his early texts, Lind here creates an absurd world and ironically undermines any ideological or metaphysical construct.

While Anglo-American critics, who have compared him to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, have responded very positively to Lind, his reception in German-speaking countries, where criticism has focused on Lind's unorthodox use of the German language, has been mixed. Starting with his autobiography Counting My Steps, however, Lind has chosen to write in English. Thus, it seems probable that the uncomfortable subject matter of his literary works as well as the fact that they defy easy labeling or categorization also account for his ambivalent reception by the German-speaking world.

—Helga Schreckenberger

See the essays on Counting My Steps: An Autobiography,Landscape in Concrete, and "Soul of Wood."