#RivetingReviews: John Munch reviews MAYBE EVEN HAPPINESS by Ludovic Bruckstein, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

A thoroughgoing appraisal of Ludovic Bruckstein’s work is long overdue. Almost forty years after the little-known Romanian author’s death this may be the moment it should be undertaken following the English publication of thirty-three of his short stories.

Bruckstein’s stamping ground of Transylvania is irrevocably entwined with the Irish author Bram Stoker’s mythic creation of Dracula. Where Stoker provides Gothic horror Bruckstein portrays stories about the quotidian challenges of humdrum provincial life in the same terrain in this collection. Linked by the same geographic mise en scène, these two writers occupy quite separate authorial realms.

Unlike Stoker, horror for Bruckstein was a tangible reality. A fleeting scan of his life uncovers the dizzying precariousness that pervaded central Europe. Nations collided around the teenage Bruckstein’s homeland. Intimations of war echoed for much of his youth. His birthplace of Munkács in Czechoslovakia lay close to the borders of four neighbouring countries – Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. It is now in Ukraine. The whole international panorama represented a potential tinder box.

Bruckstein spent his formative years in Sighet, a small Transylvanian logging town. He was part of a flourishing pre-war Jewish community with a rich Hassidic tradition. His father, Mordechai, owned a small factory producing walking canes that were exported to various European countries.

All existing “normality” was shattered finally in spring 1944 with the obliteration of the Sighet ghetto. All the town’s Jews, including the Bruckstein family – father, mother and four children – were deported to Auschwitz. Bruckstein and his younger brother Israel survived the war after transfers to forced labour camps while the remainder of the family perished.

Given these grim elemental milestones Bruckstein emerges on the page as a warm-hearted, tongue-in-cheek archivist of the foibles and fantasies of the archetypal little man – and woman – of the Carpathian mountains.

Rarely is this more so than in Solon, the Unknown, about a “grade two consultant to an administrative department” with no desire to be promoted whose only ambition was to write. At just four pages it’s more notelet than fully realised story.

But it appears in many respects to be a thinly veiled account of Bruckstein’s own experience as a would-be author. The Solon of the title “wrote about the little people, the overlooked, even the shouldered-aside, who didn’t know that they were dealing with the big people, with the chosen.” This description perfectly sums up the mix of protagonists who inhabit Bruckstein’s stories.

His reflections – written for the most part many years after Bruckstein emigrated from Romania to Israel in 1972 – add up to a pointillist patchwork of quotidian domestic experiences of rural and provincial Jewish life in inter-war Romania.

They are significant in their insignificance. The stories cover such subjects as family arguments over entitlement to an inheritance, the fate of a schoolboy know-it-all who ends his life in loneliness, and a circus acrobat who bemoans his decline from star performer in his prime to feel little better than a clown at the end of his life.

Another theme that recurs through several stories covers bizarre romantic entanglements and disappointments between couples.

Bruckstein’s son Alfred recalled in an online interview for a literary magazine that his father frequently button-holed strangers and engaged them in conversation on the street, thus providing a source of ideas for his writing.

Bruckstein’s clear and unpretentious writing style is in keeping with oral traditions of storytelling. The agile translation by Alistair Ian Blyth propels the stories convincingly to their conclusions, only occasionally striking a jarring note.

Bruckstein’s works, novels, stories and plays, deal with the sometimes cruel, sometimes comic, but mostly indifferent fate of simple people The Nobel-prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, commented in his book The Captive Mind: “Not many inhabitants of the Baltic States, of Poland or Czechoslovakia, of Hungary or Romania, could summarise in a few words the story of their existence. Their lives have been complicated by the course of historic events”.

Bruckstein may not belong to the pantheon of the very greatest of short story writers such as Chekhov and Alice Munro. But his achievement may be more distinctive – he was able to write his own survival story without rancour and recrimination.

Reviewed by John Munch

MAYBE EVEN HAPPINESS

Written by Ludovic Bruckstein

Translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth

Published by Istros Books (March 2026)

March 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

John Munch started his journalistic career as a reporter and sub-editor on the Cambridge News. He then worked for the Sheffield Morning Telegraph, The Guardian and the London Evening Standard. In the 1970s, he reported for the Toronto Star, before spending twenty-five years as a sub-editor and occasional feature writer at the Financial Times.

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