/ "Promised Land"

"Promised Land" (German: Das gelobte Land)

History of writing

Erich Maria Remarque left his homeland in the early 30s. He lived for a long time in Switzerland and America. Having emigrated from Nazi Germany, writer on own experience knew about all the "charms" of illegal life. Deprived of his homeland by the German authorities, wandering around countries and continents, in 1939 he moved to New World. Remarque received American citizenship only in August 1947.

Having started working on the plot back in 1950, the author did not have time to put an end to it. Of the three manuscripts that have survived, two have been published. In 1971, Remarque's widow was closely involved in his legacy - the novel Shadows in Paradise was published. One of the versions of the "Promised Land" was shortened and revised by the editors. Much later, in 1998, readers were able to see the latest version of the manuscript. The novel was published under the name of the author. In Russian, some publications are published under the name "Promised Land".

Plot

The main character's name is Ludwig Sommer. The young art critic is just an amateur pretending to be a professional. His name is someone else's and his passport is fake. All real remains Nazi Germany where he fled for his life. Helped Sommer, a German by nationality, his friend - a Jew from France, Robert Hirsch. It is not known how, having obtained a diplomatic passport, he saved people from death in the occupied territory.

Gloomy shadows wandering in a foreign country among unfamiliar and incomprehensible people. They are so different and with such similar fates. Hysterical fashion model, resistance member, wealthy banker. What can they have in common? Only a vague hope of returning home. Cherishes such a dream and main character. But he not only wants to return to his homeland, he needs to avenge the death of his father.

Reviews

The author of the novel does not describe military actions. But the plot is closely connected with the war. His heroes are emigrants who fled to America from the horrors of concentration camps and prisons. People who managed to avoid death lose the meaning of life, plunging into the quagmire of bourgeois life. Heroes live, think, hope, fall in love and die. For some of them, America has become a second home. And someone could not find himself in a foreign country.

The analogy between the novels Shadows in Paradise and The Promised Land is very clear. The names of the heroes have been changed, but the characters and destinies are still the same. The protagonist in The Promised Land is an aspiring amateur art critic Ludwig Sommer, in Shadows is a journalist Robert Ross. closest friend Sommer - member of the French Resistance Robert Hirsch. Ross's friend Kahn also saved lives with forged documents, he was also active in the Resistance. The novel "Shadows in Paradise" has been finalized and has a built storyline. In the "Promised Land" is clearly felt innuendo and incompleteness. But the novel didn't get any worse. Rather, on the contrary, some gaps in the plot make it possible to more fully experience the depth of the images prescribed by Remarque.

Quotes

"Loneliness is a disease, very proud and extremely harmful."

"Poor is he who no longer wants anything."

“To live without roots, one must have a strong heart. Memory is the best forger in the world; everything that a person happened to go through, she easily turns into exciting adventures; otherwise, more and more new wars would not have started.

"Help comes only when it's not needed."

“All great ideas are simple. That's why they're so hard to come by."

"Beware of your own fantasy: it exaggerates, understates and distorts."

“Only the fallen have the right to talk about the war - they went through it to the end. But they were just forced to be silent forever.

“How distant are the times when the military in ancient China considered the most lower caste, even lower than executioners, because they kill only criminals, and generals kill innocent people. Today they are in such high esteem with us, and the more people they sent to the next world, the greater their glory.

Promised land Erich Maria Remarque

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Title: Promised Land
Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Year: 1998
Genre: foreign classics, classical prose, 20th century literature

About the book "Promised Land" Erich Maria Remarque

A powerful work of tragedy German writer Erich Maria Remarque - the unfinished novel "Promised Land" - saw the light after the death of the author. The work tells the reader about the fate of emigrants in America.

Erich Maria Remarque himself experienced the tragedy of a settler. He had to leave Nazi Germany and find new home in USA. It is about such people who have lost native home, in question in The Promised Land.

The heroes of the novel - a fashion model, a successful doctor, a banker - are different, but united by one problem. They are emigrants who find it difficult to adapt to the world, not knowing war who forgot about totalitarianism, in the world of victorious democracy and universal happiness in paradise.

Settlers stumble upon friendly smiles and complete misunderstanding. They are left to themselves and are forced to survive in sunny and indifferent America. And dream about one thing - one day they will return, and everything will go as before.

At first glance, it may seem that the characters of the novel "Promised Land" live in illusions, but this is not so. With their minds, they understand that a return to the past is impossible, but they drive this destructive thought away from themselves.

Erich Maria Remarque depicts people looking for their promised land, warm and dreamed out for long months in the ghetto. America has become this land, but does reality match expectations? It looks very similar, but is it really perfect?

Erich Maria Remarque is looking for answers to these questions, sorting through the stories of heroes, like tarot cards. The whole novel is a kind of solitaire that does not add up in any way, but the characters do not leave attempts.
The story is told on behalf of one of the settlers, whom fate did not favor at all. The Nazis destroyed his family - flight and help saved good people. And now he is walking along the shaky path of an emigrant, meeting the same lost people, cut off from the familiar world, driven by the deadly hurricane of war.

The novel "Promised Land" is permeated with melancholy and sadness, which you penetrate, empathize with difficult destinies heroes, looking for answers to questions with them. The novel was not finished by the author, but still gives hope for the best.

The work has been reprinted many times. Initially as "Shadows in Paradise", and later in 1998 with the original author's title. Of course, it is worth devoting time to this immortal and emotional work of Remarque.

On our site about books site you can download for free or read online book"Promised Land" by Erich Maria Remarque in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot pleasant moments and a real pleasure to read. Buy full version you can have our partner. Also, here you will find last news from literary world, find out the biography of your favorite authors. For budding writers there is separate section With useful tips and recommendations, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at writing.

Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND

First published in the German language

Reprinted with permission from the publisher

Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. kg.

I

For the third week I looked at this city: it lay in front of me at a glance - and as if on another planet. Only a few kilometers from me, separated by a narrow arm of the sea that I could probably swim across, and yet out of reach and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was protected by the strongest bulwarks the twentieth century had devised—fortified walls of papers, passport orders, and inhuman laws of an unbreakable soulless bureaucracy. I've been to Ellis Island 1
A small island in Upper Bay near New York, south of the southern tip of Manhattan; in 1892–1943 - the main center for the reception of immigrants in the United States, until 1954 - a quarantine camp. - Note here and below. ed.

It was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay before me.

Of all the internment camps I have ever seen, Ellis Island was the most humane. Here no one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with overwork and poisoned in gas chambers. The local inhabitants were even provided good food, and free of charge, and beds in which it was allowed to sleep. Everywhere, it is true, there were sentries, but they were almost amiable. Ellis Island contained foreigners who arrived in America, whose papers either inspired suspicion or were simply not in order. The fact is that only one entry visa issued by the American consulate in European country, for America was not enough - when entering the country, you had to go through the New York immigration bureau again and get permission. Only then they let you in - or, on the contrary, they declared you an undesirable person and sent you back with the first ship. However, with sending back, everything has long been not at all as simple as before. There was a war in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war, German submarines were scouring the entire Atlantic, so passenger ships rarely sailed to European ports of destination. For some of the poor fellows who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only in days and weeks, gained the hope of staying at Ellis Island for at least some more time. However, there were too many other rumors around to flatter oneself with such hope - rumors of ghost ships packed full of Jews that ply the ocean for months and which, wherever they sail, are not allowed to land anywhere.

Some of the emigrants claimed that they had seen with their own eyes - who was on the way to Cuba, who was near the ports South America- these crowds of desperate, praying for salvation, crowding to the railings of people on abandoned ships in front of the entrance to harbors closed to them - these woeful " flying dutchmen of our days, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only fault was that they were people and thirsty for life.

Of course, not without nervous breakdowns. in a strange way here on Ellis Island they were even more frequent than in the French camps, when German troops and the Gestapo stood very close, a few kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one's own nerves was somehow connected with the ability of a person to adapt to mortal danger. There, the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people who had just relaxed at the sight of such a close salvation, after a short time when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, they completely lost their self-control. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, hope was still too strong in people, albeit pierced by despair. On the other hand, the very first innocent interrogation by the most harmless inspector could lead to hysteria: the incredulity and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile cracked for a moment, and after that a flash of new distrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Usually in men nervous breakdowns occurred more frequently than in women.

The city, lying so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a haze - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and doing nothing. Now, surrounded by flocks of ragged clouds and hoarse, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, the horns of ships, he appeared as a huge vague monster, then, late at night, bristling with a hundred towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, turned into a white and impregnable lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a blizzard of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable war nights of Europe, - about at that time, many refugees in the dormitory got up, awakened by the sobs and cries, groans and wheezes of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their sleep by the Gestapo, gendarmes and SS cutthroats, and, huddled in dark handfuls of people, talking quietly or silently, staring their burning gaze at the unsteady haze on the other side, at the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, they froze near the windows, united by a mute brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people, but never happiness.

I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external signs indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - coincided, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forgery in Marseille, and in the past a professor of mathematics, advised me not to change my surname and name in the passport; and although among the emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten quite tolerable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I nevertheless preferred to follow Bauer's advice and refuse own name, especially since there was almost no use from him anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the lists of the Gestapo, so it was about time for him to evaporate. So I had an almost genuine passport, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The craftsman Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a heavily forged passport, no matter how wonderfully it was worked out, is suitable only in case of a cursory and careless check - it is not able to resist any kind of practical forensic examination and will inevitably give out all its secrets; prison, deportation, if not something worse, in this case I am provided. But checking a genuine passport with a fake owner is a much longer and more troublesome story: in theory, you should send a request to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There is no connection with Germany. All experts resolutely advise changing not passports, but personality; the authenticity of stamps became easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that did not fit in my passport was religion. Sommer's was Jewish, mine was not. But Bauer considered that this was not essential.

“If the Germans grab you, you just throw away your passport,” he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, then, you see, you will somehow wriggle out and not immediately fall into gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew is even good for you. And explain ignorance in terms of customs by the fact that your father himself was a freethinker, and he raised you that way.

Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the papers of the Spanish consul, tried to get him out of prison, but was too late. The night before, Bauer was sent to Germany with a train.

On Ellis Island I met two emigrants whom I had only briefly known before. It happened to us several times to see each other on the "passionate path." This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which the refugees fled from the Nazi regime. Through Holland, Belgium and northern France, the route led to Paris and there it was divided. From Paris, one line led through Lyon to the coast mediterranean sea; the second, having slipped through Bordeaux, Marseilles and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and ran into the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the "passionate path." Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they still had to not fall into the clutches of the local gendarmes. Most of them had no passports, much less visas. If the gendarmes came across such, they were arrested, sentenced to imprisonment and expelled from the country. However, in many countries the authorities had the humanity to deliver them, at least not to the German border - otherwise they would inevitably die in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a valid passport with them on the road, almost all were doomed to wander almost constantly and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents, they could not get any legal work. Most suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings "passionate path." Their stops along the way were the main post offices in the cities and the walls along the roads. At the main post offices they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served as newspapers for them. Chalk and charcoal imprinted on them the names of those lost and looking for each other, warnings, instructions, cries into the void - all these bitter signs of the era of human indifference, which was soon followed by an era of inhumanity, that is, a war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one common thing.

I remember meeting one of these emigrants on Ellis Island at the Swiss border, when the customs officers sent us four times to France in one night. And there the French border guards caught us and drove us back. The cold was terrible, and in the end, Rabinovich and I somehow persuaded the Swiss to put us in prison. They drowned in Swiss prisons, for refugees it was just a paradise, we would have been very happy to spend the whole winter there, but the Swiss, unfortunately, are very practical. They quickly shuffled us through Tessin 2
Canton in Switzerland bordering Italy.

To Italy, where we parted. Both of these emigrants had relatives in America who gave financial guarantees for them. Therefore, after a few days they were released from Ellis Island. In parting, Rabinovich promised me to look for common acquaintances in New York, comrades in the emigrant misfortune. I did not attach any importance to his words. The usual promise, which you forget about at the very first steps on the loose.

Unfortunate, however, I did not feel myself here. A few years earlier, in the Brussels Museum, I had learned to sit still for hours, maintaining a stony equanimity. I plunged into an absolutely thoughtless state, bordering on complete detachment. Looking at myself as if from the outside, I fell into a quiet trance, which alleviated the unremitting spasm of long waiting: in this strange schizophrenic illusion, in the end I even began to feel that it was not I who was waiting, but someone else. And then the loneliness and crampedness of a tiny pantry without light no longer seemed unbearable. The director of the museum hid me in this pantry when the Gestapo, during the next round-up of emigrants, combed the whole of Brussels block by block. The director and I saw each other for a few seconds, only in the morning and in the evening: in the morning he brought me something to eat, and in the evening, when the museum closed, he let me out. During the day the closet was locked; only the director had the key. Of course, when someone walked down the corridor, I was not allowed to cough, sneeze, or move loudly. It was not difficult, but the tickling of fear that plagued me at first could easily turn into panic horror when a really serious danger approaches. That is why, in the matter of accumulating mental stability, at first I went, perhaps, even further than necessary, strictly forbidding myself to look at the clock, so that sometimes, especially on Sundays, when the director did not come to me, I did not know at all day or night - fortunately, I had the sense to abandon this undertaking in time. Otherwise, I would inevitably lose the last remnants peace of mind and would come close to that quagmire beyond which the complete loss of one's own personality begins. And I never really got away from her. And it was not faith in life that kept me; hope for vengeance - that's what saved me.

A week later, a thin, dead-looking gentleman suddenly spoke to me, looking like one of those lawyers who, in flocks of insatiable crows, circled our spacious dayroom. He carried a flat briefcase of green crocodile leather.

“Are you by any chance Ludwig Sommer?”

I looked at the stranger in disbelief. He spoke German.

– What about you?

– Do you know if you are Ludwig Sommer or someone else? he asked, and chuckled his short, croaking laugh. Strikingly white, large teeth did not fit well with his gray, wrinkled face.

In the meantime, I figured out that special reasons I don't seem to have to hide my name.

“I know that,” I replied. "But why do you need to know?"

The stranger blinked like an owl several times.

"I'm on behalf of Robert Hirsch," he finally announced.

I raised my eyes in amazement.

- From Hirsch? Robert Hirsch?

The stranger nodded.

- From whom else?

“Robert Hirsch is dead,” I said.

Now the stranger looked at me puzzled.

“Robert Hirsch is in New York,” he said. “I spoke to him just two hours ago.

I shook my head.

- Excluded. There's some mistake here. Robert Hirsch was shot in Marseille.

- Nonsense. It was Hirsch who sent me here to help you get off the island.

I didn't believe him. I sensed that there was some kind of trap set up by the inspectors.

"How would he know I'm even here?" I asked.

- A man who introduced himself as Rabinovich called him and said that you were here. - The stranger took out of his pocket business card. “I'm Levin from Levin and Watson. Law office. We are both lawyers. I hope this is enough for you? You are damn incredulous. Why would suddenly? Are you hiding so much?

I took a breath. Now I believed him.

“Everyone in Marseille knew that Robert Hirsch had been shot by the Gestapo,” I repeated.

Think Marcel! Levin chuckled contemptuously. We are here in America!

- Indeed? – I expressively looked around our huge day room with its bars on the windows and emigrants along the walls.

Levin let out his croaking laugh again.

“Well, not quite yet. As I see, you have not lost your sense of humor yet. Mr. Hirsch managed to tell something about you. You were with him in an internment camp in France. This is true?

I nodded. I still couldn't quite make up my mind. Robert Hirsch is alive! - was spinning in my head. And he's in New York!

- So? Levin asked impatiently.

I nodded again. In fact, it was only half so: Hirsch stayed in that camp for no more than an hour. He arrived there, disguised as an SS officer, to demand that the French commandant hand over to him two German political emigrants who were wanted by the Gestapo. And suddenly he saw me - he did not know that I was in the camp. Without blinking an eye, Hirsch immediately demanded my extradition. The commandant, a timid reservist major, who had long been fed up with everyone, did not argue, but insisted that the official transfer certificate be left to him. Hirsch gave him such an act - he always had with him a lot of various forms, genuine and fake. Then he saluted with Hitler's "heil!", pushed us into the car and was like that. Both politicians were taken again a year later: they fell into the Gestapo trap in Bordeaux.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “May I have a look at the papers Hirsch gave you?”

Levin hesitated for a moment.

- Yes, sure. But why would you?

I didn't answer. I wanted to make sure that what Robert wrote about me matched what I told the inspectors about myself. I read the paper carefully and returned it to Levin.

- It's like that? he asked again.

“Yes,” I replied, and looked around. How quickly everything changed! I'm not alone anymore. Robert Hirsch is alive. I suddenly heard a voice that I thought had been silenced forever. Now everything is different. And nothing is lost yet.

- How much money do you have? the lawyer asked.

“A hundred and fifty dollars,” I answered cautiously.

Levin shook his bald head.

- Not enough even for the shortest-term transit-guest visa to travel to Mexico or Canada. But it's okay, it can still be sorted out. Is there something you don't understand?

- I don't understand. Why should I go to Canada or Mexico?

Levin again bared his horse teeth.

“There is absolutely no need, Herr Sommer. The main thing to start with is to get you to New York. A short-term transit visa is the easiest to apply for. And once in the country, you can get sick. So much so that you will not be able to continue the journey. And you will have to apply for a visa extension, and then another. The situation may change. Put your foot through the door - that's the most important thing for now! Now do you understand?

A woman walked past us crying loudly. Levin took his black horn-rimmed spectacles out of his pocket and looked after her.

“Not much fun hanging around here, is it?”

I shrugged.

- Could be worse.

- Worse? How is that?

“Much worse,” I explained. “It is possible, living here, to die of stomach cancer. Or, for example, Ellis Island could be in Germany, and then your father would be nailed to the floor in front of you in order to force you to confess.

Levin looked straight at me.

“You have a hell of a fantasy.

I shook my head, then said:

“No, just a hell of a weird experience.

The lawyer took out a huge colorful handkerchief and blew his nose deafeningly. Then he carefully folded the handkerchief and slipped it back into his pocket.

- How old are you?

- Thirty two.

“And how many of them are you already on the run?”

- Five years soon.

It wasn't like that. I wandered much longer, but Ludwig Sommer, on whose passport I lived, only since 1939.

I nodded.

“And the appearance is not to say especially Jewish,” observed Levin.

- Maybe. But don't you think that Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Hess also do not have a particularly Aryan appearance?

Levin again let out his short, croaking laugh.

- What is not, is not! Yes, I don't care. Besides, why should a person pass himself off as a Jew, since he is not a Jew? Especially in our time? Right?

- May be.

Were you in a German concentration camp?

“Yes,” I recalled reluctantly. - Four months.

Are there any documents from there? Levin asked, and in his voice I heard something like greed.

- There were no documents. They just let me out and then I ran away.

- It's a pity. Now they would be very useful to us.

I looked at Levin. I understood him, and yet something in me resisted the smoothness with which he translated it all into business. It was too creepy and creepy. So creepy and disgusting that I myself, with great difficulty, managed to cope with it. Not to forget, no, but precisely to cope, to melt and immerse in oneself, as long as it is unnecessary. Unnecessarily here on Ellis Island—but not in Germany.

Levin opened his suitcase and took out several sheets of paper.

“Here I have some more papers: Mr. Hirsch gave me testimonies and statements from people who know you. Everything is already notarized. My partner Watson, for the sake of convenience. Maybe you want to take a look at them?

I shook my head. I knew these testimonies from Paris. Robert Hirsch was good at such things. I didn't want to look at them now. In a strange way, for some reason it seemed to me that with all the successes of today, I should leave something to fate itself. Any emigrant would immediately understand me. He who is always forced to bet on one chance in a hundred, just for this reason, will never block the path of ordinary luck. It hardly made sense to try to explain all this to Levin.

The lawyer began to shove the papers back in satisfaction.

“Now we need to find someone who is ready to guarantee that during your stay in America you will not burden the state treasury. Do you have friends here?

“Then maybe Robert Hirsch knows someone?”

- I have no idea.

"Surely someone will be found," said Levin with a strange certainty. “Robert is very reliable in these matters. Where are you going to live in New York? Mr. Hirsch offers you the Mirage Hotel. He used to live there.

I was silent for a few seconds, and then I said:

“Mr. Levin, don’t you want to say that I really will get out of here?

- Why not? Why else am I here?

– Do you really believe it?

- Certainly. You are not?

For a moment I closed my eyes.

“I believe,” I said. - I believe too.

- Very well! The main thing is not to lose hope! Or do immigrants think differently?

I shook my head.

- You see. Do not lose hope - this is an old, tried and tested American principle! Do you understand me?

I nodded. I had no desire to explain to this innocent child of legitimate rights how destructive hope can sometimes be. It devours all the resources of a weakened heart, its ability to resist, like the inaccurate blows of a boxer who hopelessly loses. In my memory, deceived hopes killed many more people than human resignation to fate, when a hedgehog-curled soul concentrates all its forces on surviving, and there is simply no room for anything else in it.

Erich Maria Remarque

Promised land

Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND

First published in the German language

Reprinted with permission from the publisher

Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. kg.

For the third week I looked at this city: it lay in front of me at a glance - and as if on another planet. Only a few kilometers from me, separated by a narrow arm of the sea that I could probably swim across, and yet out of reach and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was protected by the strongest bulwarks the twentieth century had devised—fortified walls of papers, passport orders, and inhuman laws of an unbreakable soulless bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Island, it was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay before me.

Of all the internment camps I have ever seen, Ellis Island was the most humane. Here no one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with overwork and poisoned in gas chambers. The local inhabitants were even provided with good food, and free of charge, and beds in which they were allowed to sleep. Everywhere, it is true, there were sentries, but they were almost amiable. Ellis Island contained foreigners who arrived in America, whose papers either inspired suspicion or were simply not in order. The fact is that only an entry visa issued by the American consulate in a European country was not enough for America - when entering the country, one had to go through the New York immigration bureau again and get permission. Only then they let you in - or, on the contrary, they declared you an undesirable person and sent you back with the first ship. However, with sending back, everything has long been not at all as simple as before. There was a war in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war, German submarines were scouring the entire Atlantic, so passenger ships rarely sailed to European ports of destination. For some of the poor fellows who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only in days and weeks, gained the hope of staying at Ellis Island for at least some more time. However, there were too many other rumors around to flatter oneself with such hope - rumors of ghost ships packed full of Jews that ply the ocean for months and which, wherever they sail, are not allowed to land anywhere. Some of the emigrants claimed that they had seen with their own eyes - some on the way to Cuba, some near the ports of South America - these crowds of desperate people, praying for salvation, crowding to the handrails of people on abandoned ships in front of the entrance to the harbors closed to them - these woeful "flying the Dutch of our day, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, transporters of the living dead and damned souls, whose only fault was that they were people and thirsty for life.

Of course, not without nervous breakdowns. In a strange way, here on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when the German troops and the Gestapo stood very close, several kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one's own nerves was somehow connected with the ability of a person to adapt to mortal danger. There, the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people, who had just relaxed at the sight of salvation so close, after a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, completely lost their self-control. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, hope was still too strong in people, albeit pierced by despair. On the other hand, the very first innocent interrogation by the most harmless inspector could lead to hysteria: the incredulity and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile cracked for a moment, and after that a flash of new distrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had more nervous breakdowns than women.

The city, lying so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a haze - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and doing nothing. Now, surrounded by flocks of ragged clouds and hoarse, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, the horns of ships, it appeared as a huge blurry monster, then, in the dead of night, bristling with a hundred towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, it turned into a white and impregnable lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a blizzard of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable war nights of Europe - about this time, many refugees in the sleeping hall got up, awakened by the sobs and cries, groans and wheezes of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their dreams by the Gestapo, gendarmes, and SS cutthroats, and, huddling together in dark human handfuls, talking quietly or silently, fixing their burning gaze on the unsteady haze on the other side, at the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, froze near the windows, united by a mute brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people, but never happiness.

I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external signs indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - coincided, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forgery in Marseille, and in the past a professor of mathematics, advised me not to change my surname and name in the passport; and although among the emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten quite tolerable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I still preferred to follow Bauer's advice and abandon my own name, especially since it was almost useless anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the lists of the Gestapo, so it was about time for him to evaporate. So I had an almost genuine passport, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The craftsman Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a heavily forged passport, no matter how wonderfully it was worked out, is suitable only in case of a cursory and careless check - it is not able to resist any kind of practical forensic examination and will inevitably give out all its secrets; prison, deportation, if not something worse, in this case I am provided. But checking a genuine passport with a fake owner is a much longer and more troublesome story: in theory, you should send a request to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There is no connection with Germany. All experts resolutely advise changing not passports, but personality; the authenticity of stamps became easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that did not fit in my passport was religion. Sommer's was Jewish, mine was not. But Bauer considered that this was not essential.

“If the Germans grab you, you just throw away your passport,” he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, then, you see, you will somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew is even good for you. And explain ignorance in terms of customs by the fact that your father himself was a freethinker, and he raised you that way.

Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the papers of the Spanish consul, tried to get him out of prison, but was too late. The night before, Bauer was sent to Germany with a train.

On Ellis Island I met two emigrants whom I had only briefly known before. It happened to us several times to see each other on the "passionate path." This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which the refugees fled from the Nazi regime. Through Holland, Belgium and northern France, the route led to Paris and there it was divided. From Paris, one line led through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having slipped through Bordeaux, Marseilles and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and ran into the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the "passionate path." Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they still had to not fall into the clutches of the local gendarmes. Most of them had no passports, much less visas. If the gendarmes came across such, they were arrested, sentenced to imprisonment and expelled from the country. However, in many countries the authorities had the humanity to deliver them, at least not to the German border - otherwise they would inevitably die in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a valid passport with them on the road, almost all were doomed to wander almost constantly and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents, they could not get any legal work. Most suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings "passionate path." Their stops along the way were the main post offices in the cities and the walls along the roads. At the main post offices they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served as newspapers for them. Chalk and charcoal imprinted on them the names of those lost and looking for each other, warnings, instructions, cries into the void - all these bitter signs of the era of human indifference, which was soon followed by an era of inhumanity, that is, a war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one common thing.

Plot

The novel "Shadows in Paradise" is written on behalf of the protagonist, who is a journalist by profession, who tells about his arrival in New York (USA) at the end of World War II. The novel describes archetypal collective images refugees who came from all over Europe to escape the war. Absolutely different people binds one common feature hope to return home someday. This work by Remarque describes how people, exhausted by years of war, flight and prisons, entered a paradise called the USA. Hence such an accurate comparison in the title of the novel - "Shadows in Paradise". In fact, the entire novel is permeated with descriptions of the tragedies in the lives of immigrants, and each of them copes with the psychological and physical traumas caused by the war in their own way. Someone begins to drink heavily, someone goes to work, someone becomes suicidal. The cynicism of people who were taught to be rude and lack of sentiment by the war borders on a story of sincere love and true friendship.

Data

• In 1944, the main character worked for some time in Hollywood as a consultant on the set of a film about Nazi Germany. Contrary to his recommendations, the film comes out with a "cowboy touch" that is very far from reality:

Some of the scenes were concocted from the vulgar templates of popular Western cowboy films. The same gangster morality, the same banal situations when the opponents draw their pistols at the same time and everyone tries to shoot first. All this, compared with what was happening in Germany with its bureaucratically calculated murders, with the howl of bombs and the roar of guns, gave the impression of a harmless firework. I realized that even the authors who got their hands on horror films do not have enough imagination to imagine everything that happened in the Third Reich. ( Chapter XXVI)