The Birthday Buyer
By Adolfo García Ortega
Translated by Peter Bush
978-84-94174-452
$15.29, 258 pgs
This past January I climbed the stairs beyond the bookcase. It was drizzling that day; Amsterdam brooding magnificently in the chill. I had a 10-hour layover and took the train into the center of the city to visit The Anne Frank House. I was okay until I climbed that staircase. Otto Frank survived the “purifying fire;” he walked out of Auschwitz, the only member of his family to do so. He was in the sick barracks when the Soviets liberated the camp on January 27, 1945. I wonder if he knew Hurbinek.
The Birthday Buyer
by Adolfo García Ortega, translated by Peter Bush, is the story of Hurbinek, a
little boy who was born and died in Auschwitz. He is malnourished and
developmentally stunted to the extent that he cannot speak or walk. Primo Levi
wrote of this little one, with whom he shared the sick barracks in 1945, in his
book The Truce, “Nothing remains of him;
he bears witness through these words of mine.”
The narrator, obsessed with the holocaust and the story of
Hurbinek in particular, is on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz when he is involved in
a near-fatal auto accident outside Frankfurt. He is laid up in a hospital for a
few weeks, despairing that he has failed in his mission to pay homage to
Hurbinek. Like Hurbinek, he cannot walk – his knees have been shattered.
Drawing parallels between his condition and Hurbinek’s, mindful of Mengele and
his compatriots, the narrator attempts to resist paranoia brought
on by, among other things, the German accents of his doctors. In this
psychological hothouse he chews on the un-life of Hurbinek.
Ortega has attempted to restore the humanity that was stolen
from so many by giving identity to this specific anonymity. He tells us, “I’m
horrified to think that Hurbinek, with all his strength and desire to live,
only experienced a pre-life, only lived a strange extension of his mother’s
uterus.” Ortega has given Hurbinek a complete backstory. He has given him
parents, Sofia and Yakov Pawlicka of Poland, and grandparents and aunts and
uncles and cousins. He has anchored Hurbinek’s existence in history and
geography and anthropology. The author imagines several alternative lives for
Hurbinek: he became a celebrated set and costume designer for the stage in
Moscow; or else a model employee of the Budapest Tram System; or else a writer
of award-winning biographies in Spain; or else a seminary student in France who
gave up his calling to devote himself to cinema; or else a famous Bulgarian
conductor; or else an antiquities appraiser for Sotheby’s; or else an infamous
Israeli photographer and satirist; or else a homosexual radio journalist in
Greece. These were all full lives that would've restored some beauty to the world.
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| Adolfo García Ortega |
Whew…difficult, this. Harrowing. In the interests of honesty and full disclosure, I wanted to put this book down and walk away. I wanted to never pick it up again. But I couldn’t. Once begun, I felt it necessary to bear witness, if only in imagination. A duty, if you will. Mercifully, the language is beautiful and the premise intriguing.
Adolfo García Ortega is a translator, literary critic, journalist and former editorial director of the Spanish publishing house Seix Barral. He is currently Associate Publishing Director of the Planeta Publishing Group. His critically acclaimed novels have won numerous prizes.
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