Grigori Kanovich
ABOUT SHTETL ROMANCE
"Grigory Kanovich is regarded as one of the finest writers
on Jewish themes – a giant among both Russian and Lithuanian
authors. This 2012 masterpiece has been described as a kaddish
(mourners’ prayer) for the shtetl, but it is much more. It is
part family history, part eyewitness account, part imagined
reconstruction of a world that vanished in June 1941, when the
Nazis and their collaborators annihilated every vestige of the
Litvaks – the Jews of Lithuania. Above all, it is a majestic,
affectionate, totally gripping but unsentimental account of a
way of life, the loss of which has made Eastern Europe a
lesser place."
EUROPEAN LITERATURE NETWORK
"Kanovich makes us feel and see a world, that has long
disappeard."
FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
"There is very few people who can portray life of the
Eastern European Jewish communities like Grigori Kanovich."
BRIGITTE
"Devilspel is an remarkable example of a literary work that
represents a real historical situation, with all its
complexities and nuances, as a philosophical parable of
universal significance."
MIKHAIL KRUTIKOV, PROFESSOR OF SLAVIC AND JUDAIC STUDIES,
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR
"The unique portrayal by a Jewish author of a perpetrator, or
at least a henchman, who cooperates closely with a band of
murderers, cannot be praised highly enough...
In a most disconcerting manner, DEVILSPEL illustrates what it
is like when people who are related, or joined together by
friendship or even by love, suddenly become, or are forced to
become enemies."
ORF
