“The White Sheet” – a reading with Corinna Harfouch and Hideyo Harada from Antanas Škėma’s novel of the same name

‘The White Sheet’ is a landmark work of modern Lithuanian literature. Written whilst in exile in New York, Škėma draws on his own life story to recount the life of the Lithuanian exile Antanas Garšva. In New York in the early 1950s, he works as a lift boy in the city’s largest hotel. His daily up-and-down journey in the lift strikes him as nothing less than the labour of Sisyphus (which earned Škėma the title ‘the Lithuanian Camus’). The mind-numbing repetition of the same routine, coupled with the sensory overload of the American megacity’s illusory reality, takes its toll on the nerves of the already neurasthenic Garšva, who nevertheless sees himself as a poet, born to leave behind verses for eternity.

In an expressionist and associative style, interspersed with episodic flashbacks to his own childhood and youth, the awakening of first love and its inevitable loss, political indoctrination in his homeland, and finally his emigration, the narrative reveals not only a precise, multifaceted psychological portrait of a man driven and adrift, but also a scornfully distorted mosaic of the 20th century, dominated by ideologies: from socialist Kaunas in Lithuania to the spiritually vacuous, capitalistically hollowed-out New York of the post-war years, beneath whose glittering surface the oozing pus is laid bare by Škėma’s mercilessly scalping gaze.

The translator Claudia Sinnig has rendered this finely crafted tirade in all its harshness, despair and linguistic explosiveness, thereby giving Škėma a German voice for the very first time. For German readers, this is a belated yet genuine rediscovery.

Music also plays an important role in the reading. Pianist Hideyo Harada will perform pieces ranging from Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Schumann to Čiurlionis and Bartók.

Reading: Corinna Harfouch
Music: Hideyo Harada

Kulturforum Synagogue, Görlitz
Otto-Müller-Straße 3

02826 Görlitz