A Cat in the Ghetto
Stories
Rachmil Bryks

Translated from the Yiddish by S. Morris Engel

First published in English in 1959 and long unavailable, Rachmil Bryks’s vivid stories portray Jewish life in the Lodz ghetto and at Auschwitz. In a spare and tragicomic style, they illuminate the small and large absurdities that arise at the limits of human endurance—from the cooking of “roast meat” made of cabbage leaves to the predicament of Jews forced to cooperate in the hierarchy of their own annihilation. Deceptively simple and often humorous, these stories nevertheless mirror Bryks’s nuanced view of major moral dilemmas of the period: action vs. inaction, preserving dignity vs. survival.

This new edition brings together Bryks’s well-known novellas, “A Cat in the Ghetto” and “Kiddush Hashem,” two short stories, an early poem, and his important but little-known essay, “My Credo,” in which he defends his use of black humor in writing about unspeakable tragedy. 

“Unique in world literature.”
—Isaac Bashevis Singer

“One should read it in order not to forget.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Rachmil Bryks was born in Poland in 1912. At twenty-seven he wrote his first book to critical praise. Soon after he found himself behind the barbed wire of the Lodz ghetto. He was transported to Auschwitz, then to a work camp in Germany. In 1949 he came to New York, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1974. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-327-3 / 154 pages / Fiction