The Shop on Main Street (Modern Czech Classics). This item is unavailable.The Shop on Main Street (Modern Czech Classics)

Written by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, The Shop on Main Street is the story that inspired the highly successful Academy Award–winning Czechoslovak film of the same title. Looking at the Holocaust through the eyes of a complicit individual, the narrative follows a good-natured carpenter living in a Slovak town in 1942 who unwittingly becomes a participant in a moral crisis involving the abuse and persecution of Jews. Describing the film adaptation of Ladislav Grosman’s novel, the New York Times declared that it is a “human drama that is a moving manifest of the dark dilemma that confronted all people who were caught as witnesses to Hitler's terrible crime.” The review continues: “‘Is one his brother's keeper?’ is the thundering question the situation asks, and then, ‘Are not all men brothers?’ The answer given is a grim acknowledgement. But the unfolding of the drama is simple, done in casual, homely, humorous terms―until the terrible, heartbreaking resolution of the issue at the end.”

Ladislav Grosman (1921-81) was born in Humenné, Slovakia to a Jewish family; because of this he spent two years of World War II in a forced labor camp. After the war he moved to Prague to study, eventually earning a doctorate in psychology before turning his attention to writing fiction and screenplays. Shortly after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he emigrated to Israel, where he would spend the rest of his days teaching Slavic literature and creative writing at Bar-Ilan University.