Baram Nir - Good People

INTERNATIONAL PRAISE FOR

GOOD PEOPLE

The novel is written with great talent, momentum and ingenuityIt expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes. Amos Oz

Quite possibly, Dostoyevsky would write like this if he lived in Israel today. Frank furter Allgemeine Zeitung

Good People is a masterful metaphysical novel written by a true artist. Livres Hebdo

One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today. Haaretz

A bold and brilliant novel that walks the path of greatness to the edge of the literary abyss. A. B. Yehoshua

Nir Baram is the new hope of Israeli literature[Good People is] a novel of great force and precision. Sddeutsche Zeitung

A very impressive and bold novel, a journey to hell with no return. La Repubblica

In Good People the young Israeli author Nir Baram writes about the terrors of living under the regimes of Stalin and Hitler. It is done so majestically that it reaches the same level as books by Varlam Shalamov and Vasily Grossman. NRC Handelsblad

Written with true heart and soulYou hear not only the voice of the writer, but the voices of his memorable characters too. El Pas

NIR BARAM was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. He began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels, including The Remaker of Dreams and World Shadow. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Ministers Award for Hebrew Literature. His most recent book is a work of reportage, which Text will publish in 2017.

JEFFREY GREEN is a writer and translator living in Israel. He has a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard, and has also published, among other things, a novel in Hebrew, a book of poetry and a book about translation.

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Copyright Nir Baram 2010

Translation copyright Jeffrey Green 2016

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published as Anashim Tovim in Israel by Am Oved

Published by The Text Publishing Company 2016

Design by W. H. Chong

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Baram, Nir, author.

Title: Good people / by Nir Baram ; translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey Green.

9781925240955

9781911231004 (UK paperback)

9781922253576 (ebook)

Subjects: World War, 1939-1945Fiction.

Other Creators/Contributors:

Green, Jeffrey, translator.

Dewey Number: 892.437

CONTENTS

BERLIN / WARSAW / LUBLIN

Thomas Heiselberg, market researcher at the Milton Company

Marlene Heiselberg, Thomass mother

Johannes Heiselberg, Thomass father

Hannah Stein, housekeeper and companion of Marlene

Jack Fiske, director and then president of the European department of the Milton Company

Carlson Mailer, Fiskes successor as director

Frau Tschammer, assistant director of the research department at the Milton Company

Hermann Kreizinger, Thomass schoolfriend and member of the SS

Erika Gelber, Thomass psychoanalyst

Clarissa Engelhardt, Thomass neighbour and subsequent housekeeper

Paul Blum, a partner in Bamberburg Bank

Georg Weller, senior adviser to Dr Karl Schnurre in the German Foreign Office

Rudolf Schumacher, bureaucrat in the Ministry of Economics

Hauptsturmfhrer Bauer, German intelligence officer

Albert Kresling, officer in the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost, Grings man in Poland

Sturmbannfhrer Wolfgang Stalker, SS officer working under Kresling in the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost

Sturmbannfhrer August Frenzel, commander of the freiwillige Umsiedlung, the program for the voluntary deportation of Jews from Lublin

LENINGRAD / BREST

Alexandra (Sasha) Andreyevna Weissberg, literary editor of confessions for the NKVD

Andrei Pavlovich Weissberg, Sashas father, physicist

Valeria Weissberg, Sashas mother

Vladimir (Vlada) and Nikolai (Kolya) Weissberg, Sashas younger twin brothers

Emma Feodorovna Rykova, poet

Brodsky, literary critic

Nadyezhda (Nadya) Petrovna, poet arrested by the NKVD

Konstantin Varlamov, poet

Osip Borisovich Levayev, publisher

Vladimir Vladimirovich Morozovsky, mechanic and poetry lover

Maxim Adamovich Podolsky, Sashas husband and coworker in the NKVD

Stepan (Styopa) Kristoforovich Merkalov, head of Sashas department

Reznikov, coworker of Sasha and Styopa

Nikita Mikhailovich Kropotkin, Sashas superior in Brest

BERLIN

AUTUMN 1938

People meet people. Thats how the story goes. Theres no need to be alone, not until you take your last breath. You see a world bursting with people, and are fooled into believing that your days of solitude are over. How hard can it be? Someone approaches someone else, they were both moved by The Twilight of the Gods, and by Gerhart Hauptmanns new play, both invested in Thompson Broken-Heart Solutions (The heart is the curse of the twentieth century), and theyre allies already. Its a fiction useful to the state, to society, to the market. Thanks to it, lonely people buy clothes, shares, cars, and spruce themselves up for dancing.

Through the parlour window Thomas Heiselberg could see that she was swaddled in the same fur coat shed worn the last time she left the house. She hadnt gone by choice. After all, the outside world offered her nothing. But his family could no longer afford to employ her. They had let her go and given her a white fur coat that had now turned grey. Parting is a chance to be reborn: something good might happen, another job might turn up, the pall of loneliness might be torn open.

She approached with small stepsshe had put on weight, Frau Steinsteps that seemed to say, Dont look. Theres nothing to see here. And so you have it, the cunning of history: recent events in Berlin had given Jews like her good reason to hide in the shadows.

He watched her flat face, reddened by the cold air, her delicate neck whose grace was cruelly contradicted by her short body, like a seed of beauty that, in different circumstances, might have blossomed. She was totally alone, that was clear. He had no doubt that, aside from routine exchanges, she had scarcely spoken with anyone in the years since she had left.

A car stopped next to her. Two men sat in the front seat. She didnt look at them, but her every movement indicated her awareness of their presence. She brushed a whitish curl from her forehead and kept walking. Now a stone wall hid her from his view. Thomas watched until the car disappeared in traffic. A moment later, Frau Stein emerged again and, he thought, saw his face in the window.