Soul of wood - Jakov Lind

Soul of Wood made Jakov Lind's reputation as one of the most boldy imaginative postwar writers and it remains his most celebrated achievement. In the title novella
and six subsequent stories, Lind distorts and refashions reality to make the deepest
horrors of the twentieth century his own.



Set during World War II, "Soul of Wood"
is the story of Wohlbrecht, a peg-legged veteran of World War I, who smuggles Anton
Barth, a paralyzed Jewish boy, to a mountain hideout after the boy's parents have
been sent to their deaths. Abandoning the helpless boy to the elements, Wohlbrecht
returns to Vienna, where, having been committed to an insane asylum, he helps the
chief psychiatrist to administer lethal injections to other patients. But Germany
is collapsing and the war will soon be over. The one way, Wohlbrecht realizes, that
he can evade retribution is by returning to the woods to redeem "his" hidden Jew.
Others, however, have had the same bright idea.