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Lost Classic

by Paul Kozlowski

This article originally appeared in the July 2010 Other Press newsletter.  Click here to subscribe.

Our publisher Judith Gurewich has written elsewhere in this issue about The Debba and its nuanced depiction of the conflicted Israeli psyche. She’s absolutely right, but it would be a shame if readers who simply want to devour a delicious thriller were somehow misled into thinking that The Debba is a heavy meal. Quite the contrary. It’s a propulsive zinger of a mystery, plotted to within an inch of its life, filled with colorful characters that never stoop to cliché. I enjoyed it immensely and hope you will too.

The Debba is a new book, just out this month, one of two dozen that we’ll publish this year. We think that that’s a good number–it allows us to be selective and to focus our attention on each title in a way that the houses with big lists simply can’t do. But publishing new books is only one aspect of the press. We’ve also got an active backlist studded with gems. I’d like to highlight one of them and throw out a question.

Until I started working here in January I had never heard of Icchokas Meras, much less read one of his books. He is a Lithuanian Jew, born in 1934, who lived through the horrors of the Nazi Occupation, went to school after the war, and began to write. He was expelled from Lithuania in the early 1970s when the Communists took a dislike to his work and now lives in Israel. In short, a common coming-of-age story for a whole generation of Eastern European writers born between the two World Wars. He has written a number of novels but we only publish one of them–Stalemate (translated by Jonas Zdanys). It is a masterpiece.

Set in the Vilnius ghetto in the latter days of World War II, it tells the story of a Jewish family–the Lipmans–whose youngest son is a chess prodigy. The narrative is built around a single chess match played between the son, Isaac, and the ghetto’s Nazi commandant, Schoger. Special conditions are attached to the outcome of the match: if Isaac wins, he lives and the ghetto children die; if Isaac loses, he dies and the ghetto children live; if the match is played to a draw, a stalemate, all live. Each chapter begins with a account of where the game stands. By the next-to-last page, the suspense has become unbearable: one finds it hard to breathe and is forced to close the book rather than read on to the dreadful next sentence.

Compelling as the narrative framework is, Stalemate is not simply a novel about chess, or the Holocaust, or grave moral dilemmas, although those subjects are treated magnificently in the book. It is a wonderful story filled with young love, a parent’s grief, work, sex, food, music, childbirth, sacrifice, despair and hope: all the things that make up ordinary human lives, even those lives lived under the worst of circumstances. At least two of the chapters had me in tears, unable to read on…Yet Stalemate is not depressing. It may at times be brutal, painful, and ugly, but it is also funny and filled with joy, its pathos balanced by its author’s compassion.

Here’s my question. When we published the book in 2005, it sank like a stone in the marketplace, and has lain dormant ever since. How can we get readers to pay attention to this gem now? The cover is drab, but a new cover will cost money and then what…? Advertise? Try to get review coverage? How can the tried-and-true methods work for a backlist title when they hardly work for a splashy new frontlist title? How can we get out from under the tyranny of the new? I would love your suggestions. Please send them via email. The same if you want to read Stalemate–just shoot me a request and I’ll be glad to mail you a copy. We owe this great book another shot and I’m hoping you can help us do that.

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