JMB Book Club with Anna Langfus Les bagages de sable (Bags of Sand)

It is the end of the 1940s, and a young woman wanders aimlessly through the city of Paris, following people in the metro, waiting on park benches for the next uncertain encounter. Maria survived deportation and concentration camps, emigrating from Poland to France after the war. Her everyday life is populated by dream figures, the dead members of her murdered family—next to whom the people around her themselves turn into ghostly apparitions.

This book club is moderated by translator Patricia Klobusiczky. In her afterword to the novel, which was published last year in her new translation into German by Die Andere Bibliothek, she writes:

“Perhaps it helps to remember that from the very beginning, this memory had to be fought for, individually and socially, legally and politically, and especially artistically, and that tradition, both historical and literary, must be reclaimed by each generation.”

Anna Langfus

Anna Langfus was born Anna-Regina Szternfinkiel in Lublin, Poland, in 1920, the daughter of an assimilated Jewish family. After graduating from high school, she moved with her husband Jakob Rajs to Verviers in Belgium, where she studied textile engineering at the local polytechnic university. When war broke out in 1939, the couple was in Poland and was deported to the Lublin ghetto by the German occupiers. Szternfinkiel’s husband and parents were murdered, but she herself managed to escape. In 1946, she left Poland and settled in France, where she worked as a mathematics teacher. She married Aron Langfus, whom she had already known in Poland. As one of the first Jewish survivors of the Shoah, she began to write about it in French. She received the Prix Goncourt in 1962 for her novel Les bagages de sable. Anna Langfus, whose work is now mentioned in the same breath as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, died in 1966 at the age of only 46.