Fur Alma By Miklos Steinberg -

In the end, Fur Alma is not a story about the Holocaust. It is not a story about immigration or poverty or even love. It is a story about what we carry, and what carries us, long after the reason for carrying has turned to dust.

And that is why, nearly forty years after its publication, readers still open Steinberg’s slim volume and find themselves, inexplicably, reaching for a coat they have never owned. wrote three story collections and one novel, The Silence of Boilers . Fur Alma is widely considered his masterpiece. A new critical edition, with an introduction by Nicole Krauss, is forthcoming from Archipelago Books. Fur Alma By Miklos Steinberg

The coat, we learn, was purchased in 1938. Not as a luxury, but as a betrothal gift. Alma’s fiancé, a Viennese doctor named László, bought it from a Jewish furrier who would later vanish. László himself would disappear into a labor camp. Alma, pregnant with another man’s child (David’s father, a pragmatic baker she married for papers), kept the coat anyway. In the end, Fur Alma is not a story about the Holocaust