Ivan Olbracht

"The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich is a lyrical, deeply moving story of love and the pain of emancipation, set in the now vanished world of rural East European Jewish life. Hannah is the most beautiful girl in all Polana, an orthodox Jewish village in the remote province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Involvement in the exciting new movement of Zionism takes her away to a commune in a nearby town. There she meets and falls in love with the strangely named Ivo Karajich: a Jew, yet not a Jew. The agonising drama that follows plants into her beautiful almond-shaped eyes the hard grain of sorrow that her children, too, will inherit." "Olbracht's novella is both a love story and a portrait of a world that modernity threatened and Hitler destroyed."--BOOK JACKET.

Podivuhodné přtelství herce Jesenia patří mezi psychologické romány Ivana Olbrachta. Kniha z hereckého prostředí, vydaná roku 1919, stojí na vztahu dvou herců, kteří se, i přes jejich zcela kontrastní osobnosti a životní postoje, spřátelí, vytvoří mezi sebou neobvykle pevné pouto a jejich životy budou navždy ovlivněny.

Three interrelated stories. For contents, see Author Catalog.

"Ivan Olbracht's reputation as one of Czechoslovakia's most important twentieth-century authors stems largely from his works dealing with Ruthenia, a region that after WWI became part of the newly formed nation of Czechoslovakia. His interwar novels and stories deal with the tensions between the two major ethnic groups occupying the region at that time: the Ruthenians and the Jews.". "The invulnerable Nikola Suhaj lives a Robin Hood-like existence as he and his accomplices rob travelers and Jewish merchants. The authorities, failing in their attempts to capture the outlaw, dispatch a new police captain who puts out a reward on Nikola's head - and does not care if he is brought in dead or alive. The Jewish community responds with a reward ten times as large. The results are immediate: three of Nikola's former cohorts band together and attempt to eliminate him. Weaving myth with realism, Nikola the Outlaw is considered Olbracht's masterpiece."--BOOK JACKET.