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2 books match the query 'Olbracht, Ivan'

cover of Nikola the Outlaw

Nikola the Outlaw

Ivan Olbracht

Northwestern University Press, 2001

The invulnerable Nikola Suhaj lives a Robin Hood-like existence as he and his band rob travelers and rich Jewish merchants. Nikola seems invulnerable until a new police captain and a generous reward tempt his bandit cohorts into betraying him.

Ivan Olbracht's reputation as one of Czechoslovakia's most important authors stems from his works dealing with Ruthenia and the tensions between the two major ethnic groups of the region: the Ruthenians and the Jews. Weaving myth with realism, Nikola the Outlaw is considered Olbracht's masterpiece.
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cover of The Sorrowful Eyes Of Hannah Karajich

The Sorrowful Eyes Of Hannah Karajich

Ivan Olbracht

Central European University Press, 1999

The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich is a lyrical, deeply moving story of love and the pain of emancipation, set in the now vanished world of rural East European Jewish village life. Hanna is the most beautiful girl in all Polona, a Hasidic community in the remote province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Involvement in the exciting new movement of Zionism takes her away to a commune in a nearby town. But there she meets and falls in love with the strangely named Ivo Karajich: a Jew, yet not a Jew. The agonizing drama that follows, plants into her beautiful almond-shaped eyes the hard grain of sorrow that her children, too, will inherit.

Olbracht's novella is both a great love story and a marvellous portrait of a world that modernity threatened and Hitler destroyed.

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