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Claus Stephani
Blumenkind / flowerchild
Novel
352 pages
Publication date: July 22, 2009
‘The world seemed to hold its breath as if they too sensed that times would soon be changing.’
When Jewish Beila loses her husband to the wolves, she is forced to leave her village, deny their identity, burn all their bridges. What is almost a lifetime of wandering begins. Her sole support is her ‘flowerchild’… A novel like a fairy-tale, as beautiful as it is cruel, set in the remote and archaic world of the Carpathians. A love story among the Eastern Jews, based on real events.
‘A young woman without a husband is like a leaf in the wind, anyone can stand on it as they wish...’ Beila, whose strikingly beautiful red hair could be a disaster for her, has to leave her beloved village of Arvinitza when the wolves take her husband Jacob away. Years of fear and deprivation lie ahead of her, but so do very passionate encounters… After the birth of her ‘flowerchild’ she is forced to keep moving on as far as the Eastern Carpathians, to Bukovina, and finally to sleepy, cut-off Marmatia. Here old myths and fairy-tales blossom, Germans and Jews, Ruthenians and Romanians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Gypsies live side by side in the villages, until the Fascists come.
Decades later, in 1965, Maria, Beila’s ‘flowerchild’, sets off to this hitherto remote area of Europe, to track down her mother’s fate… and she herself falls in love – unsuspectingly, tragically – with a flowerchild.
The flower child is a child of love – the Romanians call them ‘copil din flori’, because they are conceived in blossoming summer meadows. But on cold winter nights even a flower child can be taken away by the wolves or even by the prikulitsch…
It is in the archaic world of the Carpathians, where old myths and customs shape the people’s everyday lives, that this true history occurred.
Claus Stephani, born in 1938 in Brasov (Kronstadt), author, ethnologist, art historian, journalist. Studies of German and Romanian Literature and journalism in Bucharest, subsequently he became editor of the monthly journal ‘Neue Literatur’. Now living in Munich since 1990, where he studied European Ethnology and graduated with a PhD.
A passionate collector of Eastern Jewish fairy-tales, he has published them in numerous volumes, as well as in international newspapers, magazines and radio features. Flowerchild is his first novel.
All translation rights held by SchirmerGraf Verlag, Munich
For further information please adress
marion.hertle(at)schirmer-graf.de