The Children's Block by Otto Kraus

Author:Otto Kraus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

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Shashek the handyman had marvellous fingers. He turned a piece of wood in his hands and then started carving, splinter after splinter, until he had a rough outline of a face. He deepened the hollow and smoothed the brow and then suddenly, out of wooden nothingness, emerged a shape, an image, a being.

He had only a knife with a broken blade and the wood was unpolished and rough, but each puppet was alive with an inner craving and ambition. Each of the five manikins had a heart and a soul; it was unmistakably itself, and once finished couldn’t have been mistaken for anybody else.

‘Where did you learn it?’ asked Lisa Pomnenka, who admired his gift and artistry.

‘A bit here and a bit there. Made a toy horse for a nephew, nothing serious. I wanted to become a car mechanic, but Jews couldn’t be apprenticed.’

She looked at his hands, which were big and cracked by the many tasks he was doing on the Block, and which moved as if they had a life of their own. He turned his palms upwards in a gesture of giving.

‘They don’t look like Jewish hands,’ he said and his face folded into its involuntary grin. ‘I suppose I inherited them from my mother’s side. My mother wasn’t Jewish. Her people were Protestants. Working class folks, one grandfather a smith and an uncle a coal miner. Big hands and small heads.’

He stopped and blew away the wood shavings and the dust.

‘I didn’t want to be a Jew and sell shoes like my father. I wanted to use my hands.’ He paused and then went on. ‘My mother pushed me through school. “Jews are fine people,” she said. “They read books and live in good houses. They don’t come home dirty and don’t spend their evenings in a pub drinking beer. I want a better life for you and your children.’ ”

He looked up and his voice was angry. ‘I’ll die because my mother wanted a better life for me and for my children. Why can’t parents let their kids live their own lives?’

Lisa Pomnenka saw that he had carved her likeness into the face of Princess Marmalade and was flattered. What she wasn’t aware of was that he was in love with her and suffered each time he saw her together with Alex Ehren.

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