"People of the City and Suburbs" by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, summary

This collection of prose was published in 2013. It combines the novel in letters and documents, "Daniel Stein, Translator," completed in 2006, and the cycle of short stories, short stories, and travelogues, "Our Tsar’s People," created in 2005. This book is a profound artistic exploration of human destiny, faith, memory, and personal responsibility against the backdrop of the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The central work of the collection, the novel “Daniel Stein, Translator,” was awarded first prize at the national literary award “Big Book” in 2007.

Salvation in Emsk and the choice of faith

The novel’s narrative is informed by letters, diaries, tape recordings, and official documents. In 1985, in Boston, Eva Manoukian meets the elderly widow Esther Gantman. Eva was born in the winter of 1942 in the Belarusian forests, where her pregnant mother, Rita Kovacs, fled from the Emsk ghetto. Esther and her late husband, surgeon Isaac Gantman, were among the three hundred prisoners who escaped the castle thanks to the help of a young translator, Dieter Stein.

In the fall of 1941, Dieter Stein, a Polish Jew who spoke German, identified himself as a Pole and found work as a translator for the Belarusian police chief, Ivan Semenovich, and then transferred to the commandant’s office, under Major Adolf Reinhold. Stein secretly passed information to the partisans and supplied the ghetto underground with weapons. Upon learning of the ghetto’s liquidation scheduled for August 1942, he misinformed the gendarmerie and organized a mass escape.

Following a denunciation from Nahum Bauch, who remained in the ghetto, Major Reinhold exposed the young man but allowed him to escape. Dieter hid in the attic of the Catholic nuns of the Sisters of the Resurrection Convent. He spent fifteen months there, reading the New Testament and being baptized. At the end of 1943, Stein joined the Soviet partisans in Colonel Durov’s unit. Suspected of being a spy, the fugitive was rescued by Dr. Gantman and his fellow Zionist youth, Ephraim Zwick.

Serving on Carmel and searching for origins

In 1945, Dieter returned to Poland and entered the Carmelite monastery in Krakow, taking the monastic name Daniel. In 1959, Brother Daniel moved to Israel, settling at the Stella Maris Monastery on Mount Carmel. He located his younger brother, Avigdor, who lived on a moshav in Galilee. Daniel applied for citizenship under the Law of Return, insisting that he remained Jewish by nationality despite being a Catholic priest. The Israeli Supreme Court rejected his application, granting citizenship only through naturalization.

Brother Daniel founded an unusual Christian community in Haifa. Its members included members of mixed families, immigrants from Poland, Hungary, the USSR, and Arab Christians. Since 1964, his constant assistant has been a young German woman, Hilda Engel, the daughter of a Nazi general who came to atone for her people’s historical guilt. The parishioners restored the ancient Church of the Prophet Elijah at the Well. Daniel began conducting services in Hebrew, striving to revive the Jerusalem Church of the time of the Apostle James.

Daniel is convinced that Jesus’s teachings grew out of Judaism, and that later Greco-Roman theology distorted the original message of love and commandments. Professor David Neuhaus is researching these same historical roots in Jerusalem. Daniel’s community takes on the care of the frail elderly, opens a shelter, and helps the homeless. Hilda has a long-term affair with a married Arab Christian, Musa, a botanist and garden conservationist.

The fates of loved ones and the trials of the community

The parishioners’ lives are full of drama. Grazyna, a Polish woman who sheltered her Jewish husband, Metek, during the war, loses her son to a soldier, then her husband, and then commits suicide. Hilda and Musa break off their affair to save his gravely ill son. Later, Musa’s family perishes during the First Intifada at the hands of Islamic militants. In 1970, a gang of robbers sets fire to the orphanage at the Temple of Elijah, killing an elderly Dutch woman, Ans Bressels. Philanthropist Paul Ecke helps purchase a house for the congregation in Haifa.

A secret nun from Vilnius, Teresa Benda, joins the community. Expelled from the monastery, she enters into a fictitious marriage with philologist Yefim Dovitas, converts to Orthodoxy, and emigrates to Israel. Daniel blesses them to live as a married couple. They have a son, Isaac, with Down syndrome, whom the parents consider a messenger from heaven. Yefim later accuses Daniel of heresy and denounces Stein’s liturgy without the Creed to the church authorities.

Eva Manoukian’s mother, the fanatical communist Rita Kovacs, who had survived Polish prisons, partisan forests, and Stalin’s camps, was living out her final days in a nursing home in Haifa. Shortly before her death in 1990, she was baptized into the Anglican Church. Eva’s husband, Grisha, was in a serious car accident, and her son, Alex, openly declared his homosexuality.

The Memory and Death of Daniel

In August 1992, ghetto survivors gather in Emsk to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the escape. Reuben Lachish erects a memorial sign at the site of the executions. Brother Daniel celebrates mass in the dilapidated town church, remembering the dead and their rescuers. Eva Manoukian meets Stein and finds peace.

In December 1995, Daniel visits the dying Professor Neuhaus in Jerusalem. On the way back on a mountain road, the car’s brakes fail. The car plunges into a ravine and burns to ashes. Almost simultaneously, the half-mad monk Feodor, obsessed with finding a mythical Jewish secret, enters the Temple of Elijah at the Spring, stabs the deaf Arab guard Yusuf, and destroys the altar. Daniel’s community disperses.

Stories of people and the vicissitudes of life

The book’s second section, the "Our Tsar’s People" cycle, brings together stories and novellas about the individual destinies of different generations. The story "The Donkey’s Path" recounts a trip to the hermit Genevieve’s French mountain village, where a house concert and the arrival of a lamb create a small Christmas miracle. "The Ladder" depicts the life of a crippled front-line soldier, Vasily Loshkarev, his patient wife, Granya, and a girl, Nina, in a post-war barracks.

The novella "The Corridor System" paints a picture of a Moscow communal apartment: mother Emma runs down the hallway with a hot frying pan for her husband, later experiencing forbidden love, while her grown daughter Zhenya keeps vigil by her deathbed in the oncology ward. In the story "The Great Teacher," young repairman Gennady Tuchkin becomes fascinated with Steiner’s anthroposophy until he discovers that the vaunted teacher is his grumpy neighbor in the communal apartment, and the true spirit of faith was carried by his paralyzed grandmother.

The story "The Deserter" recalls the rescue of Tilda, a poodle, from service as a live anti-tank mine in the fall of 1941. "A Cat of Great Beauty" describes the misadventures of translator Nina Arkadyevna with her obstinate pet Pussy. The novella "Tom" tells the story of a timid yard dog and the homeless guard Vitka in a general’s apartment building. "The Body of a Beauty" tells the story of Tanya Nevolina, who suffered from her own dazzling appearance and found happiness in marriage to Boris, a blind physics teacher.

Secrets of origin and the memory of generations

The "Secret of Blood" cycle brings together four stories about hidden kinship. In "Establishing Paternity," the magnanimous Lenya repeatedly takes his unfaithful wife Inga and raises her children by different men. In the short story "The Eldest Son," a father painfully reveals to his firstborn, Denis, the truth about his illegitimate birth on their silver wedding anniversary, but his son receives the revelation with genuine relief. The story "Singing Masha" tells the story of a pure girl whose seminarian husband is driven mad by baseless jealousy, after which Masha finds happiness with an art restorer.

The novella "The Son of Noble Parents" reveals the fate of mathematician Misha Raizman. He was raised by a war veteran and poet named Grigory, who knew that the boy’s biological father was a secret physicist and academic who had saved the young man after a serious injury.

The story "They Lived a Long Time…" describes the noble elders Nikolai Afanasyevich and Vera Alexandrovna, who lived past their 100th birthday and kept their twin daughters in strict obedience. After the simultaneous death of their parents, the elderly sisters unexpectedly discover the joy of a free life. In the short story "…And They Died on the Same Day," the elderly Perlovsky couple die in the same hospital on the same day, proving the power of unbreakable love.

The final travelogue series, "Road Angel," captures the author’s autobiographical memories, from his post-war dacha childhood to his travels abroad. These essays weave together chance encounters, life-saving coincidences, and reflections on the faith, kindness, and compassion that unite people across all boundaries.