ABSTRACT

Piotr Rawicz (1919–1982) was a Polish-Ukrainian Jew who, after surviving more than two years of captivity in Auschwitz, settled permanently in Paris in 1947, working variously as a journalist, Polish legation press attaché, polyglot translator, chauffeur, and meat salesman. Opening in a cafe on the boulevard Montparnasse, the novel takes off after Rawicz hands over his authorial responsibilities to the café owner, who in turn alternates telling, and listening to, the gruesome, miraculous survival tale of his customer, Boris. As in Rawicz’s own life, the resourceful Boris flees with a girlfriend, Naomi, through Nazi-infested East Galicia. Boris’s “tool,” he terms it, bears the fatal “hieroglyph,” the “sign of the Covenant,” yet it is also the instrument of his easily excitable sex drive, which thus still links him, amidst so much murder, to the sheer biological forces of life.