![]() ![]() ![]() And Alma's mother, Charlotte, is now translating the novel for an unknown correspondent. It was published in Spanish in Chile, passed off by Gursky's childhood friend as the friend's own work. We soon move from Gursky's empty little apartment to a more lively home, a family where a widowed mother, Charlotte, is bringing up a young boy and a 14-year-old girl who was named Alma after the heroine of a book her father loved. So the Holocaust allowed him to survive, but without the core of himself, and it seems that all we see is the husk of the man, withered and waiting for death. ![]() He also wrote a great novel in Poland, The History of Love, but entrusted it to a friend who later told him that it was lost. He loved a woman, Alma, in Poland, but because he took too long to get to America she married somebody else. Although he seems to be a man without much of a life, we soon learn that he was once rich in art and love. Gursky is terrified of dying on a day when nobody has noticed him, which drives him to mildly attention-seeking behaviour - dropping his change in a shop, say. He is an elderly Jew who came to America from Poland after the second world war, having survived the Holocaust in hiding, "mostly in trees, but also cracks, cellars, holes". ![]() We first meet Leo Gursky when he believes he is nearing the end of his life, living alone in a tiny apartment in Manhattan. ![]()
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