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Overview

"A novel as suspenseful as it is complex."—Deutsche Welle TV

Loosely based on the true story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose fabricated 1995 Holocaust memoir transfixed the reading public, The Canvas has a singular construction—its two inter-related narratives begin at either end of the book and meet in the middle.

Amnon Zichroni, a psychoanalyst in Zurich, encourages Minsky to write a book about his traumatic childhood experience in a Nazi death camp, a memoir which the journalist Jan Wechsler claims is a fiction. Ten years later, a suitcase arrives on Wechsler's doorstep. Allegedly, he lost the suitcase an a trip to Israel, but Wechsler has no memory of the suitcase, nor the trip, and he travels to Israel to investigate the mystery. But it turns out he has been to Israel before, and his host on the trip, Amnon Zichroni, has been missing ever since...

A mind-bending investigation of memory, identity, truth, and delusion, The Canvas is the publishing event of the year, a novel whose meaning depends on the order in which it is read.

Benjamin Stein was born in East Berlin in 1970. He has worked as an editor and correspondent for various computer magazines and has been a corporate It advisor since 1998. He owns the author-run publishing house Edition Neue Moderne and writes the literary weblog Turmsegler. Benjamin Stein is married with two children and lives in Munich.

Brian Zumhagen has been a weekend anchor at WNYC since 2003. He received a grant from the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship to produce radio features for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Canvas is his first book translation.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781934824658
Publisher: Open Letter
Publication date: 09/26/2012
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 342
Product dimensions: 8.30(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Benjamin Stein was born in East Berlin in 1970. He has worked as an editor and correspondent for various computer magazines and has been a corporate It advisor since 1998. He owns the author-run publishing house Edition Neue Moderne and writes the literary weblog Turmsegler. Benjamin Stein is married with two children and lives in Munich.

Brian Zumhagen has been a weekend anchor at WNYC since 2003. He received a grant from the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship to produce radio features for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Canvas is his first book translation.

Read an Excerpt

THE CANVAS


By BENJAMIN STEIN

OPEN LETTER

Copyright © 2010 Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, München
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-934824-65-8


Chapter One

Normally we don't open the door on Shabbos if someone buzzes our apartment. Family and friends wouldn't ring the doorbell. We'd be expecting them, and around the appointed time, they would wait on the other side of the street, so we could see them from the window and go down to let them into the building.

Hashem arranged it ingeniously: during every meal and on Shabbos, we're reminded that we live among strangers, in exile. Our Catholic neighbors don't hang out the wash on their holy Sunday, but that would hardly stop them from writing a letter or driving the car out to the country after mass. The students who share an apartment one flight down have only a very vague idea of God, I'm afraid. In German cities, he's not really fashionable. Nowadays, people around here don't want to hear too much about someone who makes such elaborate and restrictive demands, like keeping Shabbos.

Of course there are exceptions, like José Molina, a slightly overweight, tremendously friendly musician who lives with his boyfriend in the apartment next door. We've never asked him where he comes from. I've always liked imagining that he's a Chilean exile. Of course that has something to do with his name, the Kiss of the Spiderwoman, and his accent, which is difficult to place geographically. Though I'm not sure where Molina comes from, I do know that he has traveled widely and spent a few years in New York. He lived in Brooklyn, in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. We found that out one Friday, when we had to ask him to accept the delivery of our new washing machine. They were supposed to bring it early in the afternoon, but Shabbos was about to begin and they still hadn't come.

Molina knew just what to do. He gave the delivery men all the necessary paperwork, signed the receipt, and even gave them both a tip. We didn't have to explain anything to him. He just laughed and said: I never dreamed that I would come in handy as a Shabbos goy again in Germany!

Neighbors like José Molina are rare. If you want to keep Shabbos in this country, you have to build yourself a fortress. As soon as you step outside your door, you walk into a religious minefield, and it's just as dangerous when someone enters from the outside—by ringing the bell, on Shabbos, at our door.

Thanks to my wife, I no longer feel cornered when this kind of thing happens. Just don't answer, she said one time, when I was trying to get rid of yet another mailman, because I wouldn't have been able to accept the package or sign for it.

How do you explain yourself at a moment like that? It throws me off completely. I feel like an idiot. It's embarrassing. And on top of that, I'm ashamed that I'm embarrassed. Embarrassed to explain to a complete stranger what Shabbos is, that it's Shabbos now, and that that's why I can't accept the package, but I can't ask him to take it back, either.

When I feel embarrassed, I become unfriendly. And my rudeness then makes my wife uncomfortable. And so, when the bell rings on Shabbos, the door stays closed.

And it would have stayed closed yesterday, if I hadn't been playing with my kids in the hallway, horsing around and giggling so loudly that we could be heard in the stairwell. The door would have stayed closed if the man who was trying to come up to see us had been standing outside at the building entrance and not right in front of our apartment, knocking and calling out for us to open up. Ignoring him when he knew someone was home just seemed too impolite. And so I opened the door.

The guy waiting in the stairwell was—what else?—a courier. He seemed annoyed. I didn't see a package or a letter. But he had a suitcase and the inevitable clipboard with the receipt that was waiting for my signature, which I was going to have to withhold once again. Still, I decided not to say anything for the time being.

The courier explained that he'd come from the airport. The airline regrets the delay, he told me. But your luggage has finally been found. Here it is, he said. I just needed to sign for it, then he could be on his way. He told me he still had a lot of stops to make.

I exhaled. This time the problem was easy to solve. When you consider the extensive security measures at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where every piece of checked baggage, and every carry-on bag, is tagged with a barcode sticker, it seems impossible that they could lose a piece of luggage, or that it could get lost and end up unclaimed somewhere, waiting to be recovered.

I'm not missing a suitcase, I told him.

That can't be right, the courier replied. Wait a minute, here it is: January 7th, TUIfly Tel Aviv—Munich. You reported the loss.

I couldn't recall doing that. There must be some way to verify that I only checked one suitcase, I said.

That's not my department, the courier told me. He said he only delivered the bags when they'd been found. And he said they tend to turn up even when they've been lost for weeks. Some bags end up going halfway around the world, he told me, because someone mistakenly loaded them onto the wrong plane.

Be that as it may, I assured him, the suitcase is not mine.

You've got to be kidding me! the courier shouted. I could understand why he was getting angry, because he showed me the address tag, which certainly looked like I had filled it out.

I gave the bag a closer look. It was a pilot suitcase, black, presumably faux leather with riveted bronze-colored code snap locks.

But the locks are broken, I said.

Yes, the courier conceded, the airline apologizes for that, too. But there are no exceptions, he said. Customs and Border Protection have to inspect every piece of luggage that is reported lost and then reappears. All of that's explained in the cover letter, he told me. I'd have to read that later, he said, because right now he really didn't have time to go over everything with me.

I'm just the courier, you know, he continued, now sounding perhaps just a little bit desperate. If you want to file a complaint, call this number, he said. And he pointed to a number starting with 0180 at the top of the cover letter, which I was just as reluctant to accept as I was to take the suitcase itself.

To top it all off, now my kids were getting curious. They were sneaking a peek at the suitcase through the open apartment door.

Are there presents in there, Papa?

What presents?

You know, all the presents you bought for us in Israel!

I already gave you those!

But look, Papa, there have to be more presents in the suitcase. Yay!

Yes, kids, the courier said, the suitcase is definitely full of presents for you, and your papa just didn't want to tell you, because the suitcase was lost. But we found it, and I've brought it back, with all the presents inside. There's nothing missing.

If someone had told me before about the kinds of underhanded tricks couriers are prepared to play to get rid of suitcases, I would never have believed it.

My son could no longer restrain himself. He jumped around the suitcase excitedly, lost his balance, and fell over it, thudding against the door of our neighbor Molina, who was practicing on his violin. I absolutely had to restore the balance of power, so I resorted to a ruse of my own.

Why don't you go in, I said to the kids, and ask Mama if she has another dessert for you?

That worked. The children dashed into the apartment, shouting. But it didn't do me any good. As soon as they were gone, José Molina opened his door, violin in hand.

He probably thought I had knocked. I noticed the friendly gleam in his eyes that I remembered from the Friday with the washing machine. With one look, he grasped the situation.

Oh, he said, they brought your suitcase! And then he turned to the courier and asked if he couldn't sign for me, since he was practically part of the family.

Of course, said the courier, relieved, and he quickly held out the clipboard. Molina added his signature to the list, took the suitcase, and, without being asked, carried it through our doorway and put it down in the hall.

So that's it, right? Molina called toward the hallway. But the courier was already on his way out. You could hear him half a flight down, mumbling: It takes all kinds ... And before I had a chance to explain myself, my neighbor patted me on the shoulder sympathetically. A few seconds later, he had disappeared into his apartment with the violin and the feeling that he'd done a good deed.

There was no dessert after dessert. My wife is unrelenting about such things. The children didn't get any presents, either, which really disappointed them. Today, a few days after it was delivered, the suitcase is still sitting there, unopened, in my office. After all, it is simply a fact—and I would swear it in court—that I have never seen it before.

The days have turned to weeks, and then to months. The suitcase is still in my office. I haven't opened it. It's right next to my desk, and my eyes are invariably drawn to it if I look up from my work for a moment, if I stop staring at the screen and the keyboard and allow my eyes to wander. I have begun to hope that maybe it will merge with its surroundings, become one with the desk, disappear among the piles of books and become invisible, like so many of the things that surround us day after day, things we get used to and then at some point no longer notice.

But in this case, it seems that my hopes are in vain. This suitcase is something like a spike in my flesh, the splinter you get when you're absentmindedly walking along an old dock. It's just a little prick, but it startles you and disrupts your thoughts, which in my case means being jolted out of my routine daydreaming.

I am a publisher and an author. For many hours of the day—some would even say: without any interruption whatsoever—I am occupied with stories, biographies, and incidents, both outrageous and mundane, but in any event with material, nothing but scraps of reality that deserve, one and all, to be lovingly fictionalized. Or that already have been fictionalized. No one knows better than I that the boundary between reality and fiction in every story runs meanderingly through the middle of language, concealed and in comprehensible—and movable. Even the word "actuality" leads to uncertainty. Who can say whether it's a synonym for reality or instead stands for everything that acts—a very subjective picture that depends more on the eye of the beholder than it does on the object being observed.

The fact that this suitcase is here means that a boundary has been crossed. It really shouldn't be here, reminding me each time I see it that something isn't the way it should be. The splinter is in my foot. I can bear it; it wouldn't be worth mentioning if I didn't need to pull it out to keep the tiny wound from getting infected. And if it weren't for my undeniable fear of that small, insignificant operation—the moments that stretch out intolerably as you sit there with tweezers and a sanitized needle, trying to get the tiny little piece of wood out of your flesh.

The fact that the suitcase is here, with its tie-on address label filled out in my handwriting, the fact that it's here, even though I am still convinced that it doesn't belong to me and has never belonged to me—none of this is a big deal. But the fact that I am afraid to open it and find out what's inside, that's anything but insignificant.

What is true is that I have had very similar suitcases twice in my life. I got one shortly after I accepted my first permanent position as an editor at a magazine. That was a good fifteen years ago; but I still distinctly remember buying it.

It was my first acquisition in Munich, where I had just moved from Berlin to take the position—temporarily, of course. At least that's what I told myself at the time. As a Berliner, you don't move to Munich permanently. You're just there temporarily, for a visit. And when you say you're going home, even after several years in this transient state, you still mean Berlin, even though you've given up your apartment there for financial reasons, and you have to spend the weekend at a hotel or a friend's place.

Back then I didn't have a car or a license, and since I've never liked long train rides, I had to fly. Given my editor's salary, I could only afford the trip over a long weekend once a month, but that solution had the undeniable advantage of being quite comfortable.

What I really needed was a suitcase with the maximum allowable dimensions for carry-on luggage, a bag that could hold a lot but wouldn't have to be checked, so I could be spared all the waiting around at the baggage claim when I reached my destination.

The monthly trips home weren't the only reason I bought my first pilot suitcase. As part of the job, I had to go out of town at least once a month for a day or two, and sometimes even a whole week. The conferences and press events, where I reported on companies and the products they were introducing, were held regularly in all kinds of cities in Europe and the United States—I went to those places by plane, too.

At that time I was fascinated by electronic gadgets, and since I worked for a computer magazine, I always had to be equipped with the very latest laptop, electronic organizer, and mobile phone. (Not that anyone equipped me. I equipped myself, which, despite certain press rebates, meant that there often wasn't enough money left at the end of the month for the flight home. And so, instead of flying to Berlin, I would end up spending the long weekend in my "transitional" apartment in Munich, studying product manuals and transferring data to my latest acquisition.)

Given my almost emotional attachment to these technical devices and the considerable amount of money they consumed, it was hard for me to leave my mobile office in the hands of those rough baggage handlers. I couldn't run the risk of anything getting damaged or ending up lost on the other side of the globe because someone forgot to load my bag onto my connecting flight. As a result, having a suitcase that would allow me to travel around the world for several days with only one carry-on was more important to me than having food in the house. So, on one of my first lunch breaks as an editor, I bought that first pilot suitcase, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the one here today.

It looks like it, but it's not the same one. I know this because my old suitcase met a similar fate—it also went missing, because, in a careless and lazy moment, I had decided to check my bag on a flight from Los Angeles to Munich via Atlanta.

I got it back. A courier from the airline brought it to my door, but only after two endlessly long weeks of uncertainty. Customs had opened it, the combination locks were intact, but the face panel, which was made of firm cardboard covered with leather, was torn up. Nothing was missing, and the contents of the suitcase weren't damaged. None of my luggage had gotten lost. But the suitcase itself was finished.

It wasn't a real loss, because I quit my job at the magazine a few days later. At the moment I can't remember why I quit. Why didn't I want to work as an editor anymore, and why, of all times, after that trip to America? I don't know. I even have to admit that, at present, I can only assume that I quit. I'm not certain of it.

I can still see myself coming down the stairs with the damaged suitcase, intending to throw it into the garbage bin in the courtyard. I was sure that I no longer needed it. I wouldn't be flying again anytime soon. That was exactly what was going through my head as I opened the lid on the trash can. It was empty and smelled musty, slightly sour, like spoiled milk. It was drizzling. I remember it clearly. Every detail is present. It's all the more incomprehensible that it's just not coming back to me why, on that evening, I believed that the suitcase, damaged or not, was expendable.

Maybe I am wrong and I had already quit. Or there was an incident that left me convinced that it was going to happen inevitably. That's just as possible. Strange. I can usually rely on my memory.

The second pilot suitcase I can verify that I owned was a present my mother gave to me—to celebrate the founding of my publishing company. I had told her the news while I was visiting her in Berlin.

Now you're going to have to fly a lot again, she said, when she gave me the gift the next day. She seemed more worried than excited.

I don't know where my mother gets her information about the day-to-day life of publishers. Whatever jet-setter she had in mind couldn't possibly have been the owner of a small literary press. Still, it's widely known that maternal care has an infinite half-life; what's more, rebelling against it is as futile as fighting the forces of nature. Objective reasoning will only lead to complications. After all, a moment like that involves a mother's noble feelings, and it's best not to hurt those with petty objections.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from THE CANVAS by BENJAMIN STEIN Copyright © 2010 by Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, München . Excerpted by permission of OPEN LETTER. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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