Novel
Stalemate
Lygiosios trunka akimirką
Icchokas Meras · 1963
Synopsis
In the Vilnius ghetto, Commandant Schoger wants to take away the last children. To the father who pleads for them, he proposes a game of chess against his son Isaac, a young prodigy: if Isaac wins, the children stay, but Schoger will kill him with his own hand; if he loses, his life will be spared, and the children will leave the next day. Only a draw would escape both outcomes. Around the game, which lasts several days, pass the love of Isaac and Esther, the resistance and other lives of the ghetto.
Context
Published in Vilnius in 1963, the novel is Meras's best-known book abroad. Its chapters are named after the pieces and the moves, and the narrative, which follows the course of the game, shifts point of view, down to that of a boy who may have escaped from a convoy. The author, a child survivor of the Holocaust, constantly returns to Jewish themes. A French version appeared as early as 1969 in Moscow; translated by Dimitri Sesemann, the book was taken up by Stock, in an expanded edition in 2003, and has appeared in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Russian and Ukrainian.
Who it is for
For a short, tight novel about an impossible choice, in which chess becomes the image of life under terror.
Prizes and reception
Translated into some ten languages, it is praised as a strong and inventive account of life in the ghetto.