Magical Tales from the Carpathians

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Barbican Library - City of London Libraries

Book launch of The Fate of Yaakov Maggid by Ludovic Bruckstein

Barbican Library

In this new collection the late Ludovic Bruckstein opens the door onto a lost world of Jewish history and lore in the central European Carpathian region, now parts of Hungary, Romania and Ukraine. Invoking the tales of a great maggid – a wandering storyteller within the East-European tradition of Hasidism - he weaves tales of wisdom and mystery which linger inside us long after the story has ended. Bruckstein&#x27;s previous titles (The Trap, 2019 and With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, 2021) have gained him a growing audience of dedicated readers in the English-speaking world, where his work has been too-long absent. Thankfully, his words have been brought alive for English readers by Alistair Ian Blyth, who has translated so many great works of Romanian literature over recent years.Join the author&#x27;s son Freddy Bruckstein in conversation with former BBC journalist, George Stanica, on the life and work of the author and playwright Ludovic Bruckstein, whose works, novels, stories and plays, deal with the sometimes cruel, sometimes comic, but mostly indifferent fate of simple people whose lives are under the control of highly unpredictable forces. Bruckstein belonged to a generation so well described by the writer Czeslaw Milosz, in his book “The Captive Mind”: “Not many inhabitants of the Baltic States, of Poland or Czechoslovakia, of Hungary or Romania, could summarize in a few words the story of their existence. Their lives have been complicated by the course of historic events.” However, in spite of the complications and tragedies, the many disappointments and missed opportunities of his own life, Ludovic Bruckstein looked at the world with humor and optimism, and a great capacity to understand and smile at it. Ludovic (Joseph-Leib, Arye) Bruckstein was born on the 27th of July 1920, in Munkacs, then in Czechoslovakia, now in Ukraine. He grew up in Sighet, a small town in the district of Maramures, in the Northern region of Transylvania, a town well known for its flourishing pre-war Jewish community and Hassidic tradition. Bruckstein managed to survive the Holocaust and he and his family left Romania 1970 and settled in Israel, where his work continued to be published in Romanian and also translated into Hebrew. In Israel, Bruckstein won the Jerusalem-Brickman Prize, the Zion Prize and the Jewish Agency’s Literature Prize for his work.Freddy Bruckstein is Ollendorff Professor of Science in the Computer Science Department at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he teaches &amp; conducts research on Image Analysis, Signal Processing and Ant Robotics. He has added his own illustrations for each of his father&#x27;s books in their English editions. Istros Books ltd. www.istrosbooks.com Istros Books is an independent press focusing on the literature of Central and S E Europe. Publishing contemporary fiction and non-fiction as well as forgotten classics, we hope to provide a window onto this region and showcase the wonderful stories that arise from these rich, fascinating cultures. Supporting us through book sales is a way to help us achieve our goals and keep diversity in publishing.

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Magical Tales from the Carpathians

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