BOOKS
HE
OREST
READS
For more than
20 years,
the dream
of a
Dutch author
and a Chicago
translator
lay hidden
in a brown
briefcase.
M
uch of the home
was destroyed by
a fire that cut
through the
apartment like a
red-hot knife. Books were
burned, furniture was
destroyed, family heirlooms
were lost forever.
A briefcase remained.
Kalman Kaplan found the
briefcase in his father's
closet when he came to help
his mother clean up after the
fire. The briefcase was
brown, slightly worn on the
edges.
Inside its dusty red pockets
Kaplan found a manuscript.
More than 1,000 pages long,
it was typewritten with
phrases crossed out and
words neatly printed in
black ink on the sides.
It took years for Kaplan,
psychology professor at
Wayne State University, to
discover that the manuscript
was his father's translation
of a Dutch novel. It took
even longer for him to get
that manuscript published.
But today, In A Dark Wood
Wandering, by Hella HaasSe
and translated by Lewis
Kaplan, is on the best seller
list in cities throughout the
United States.
It is a victory both for the
translator and his son, who
was determined to see the
book published.
"I thought it was a miracle
that the manuscript surviv-
ed and was put in my
hands," Kalman Kaplan
says. "I had a responsibility
to see that it was published,
and I wasn't going to take no
for an answer."
Lewis Kaplan loved
nothing more than lang-
uages and literature.
Born in Chicago, he served
as Latin American editor of
his high school newspaper.
He studied Spanish and
Portuguese, then used dic-
tionaries and grammar
books to teach himself
Afrikaans, Romanian,
Italian, Hebrew, German,
Dutch and Arabic. He also
knew Yiddish and wrote
schools throughout Chicago
"demanding they put
Yiddish on their cur-
riculum," his son recalls.
After graduating Marshall
High School, Kaplan attend-
ed junior college, but was
forced to drop out to help
support his brothers and
sister. He found an apart-
ment overlooking a lake and
joined the WPA Federal
Writer's Project, where his
colleagues included Saul
Bellow, Ben Hecht and
Studs Turkel. In 1939, he
took a job with the post of-
fice.
A shy and sensitive man,
Kaplan "found it very
difficult to realize he was as
talented as he was." He lov-
ed the "Song of Songs" and
foods from around the world.
ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
Assistant Editor
a)
a)
Kalman Kaplan holds the final version and original translated draft of In
A Dark Wood Wandering.
40
FRIDAY. MAY 4. 1990
"He used to bring home all
kinds of crazy cheeses,"
Kalman says.
Kaplan also became in-
creasingly interested in
Judaism. He became "fierce-
ly aware of the Holocaust,"
after seeing anti-Semitic
fliers at the post office where
he worked, Kalman says.
Around 1945, he found a
black book describing Nazi
atrocities, which he trans-
lated from German and tried
to get published in the
United States. "But he
couldn't get American
publishers to touch it."
Kaplan often spent his
evenings and weekends
translating works by
Brazilian authors.
Kalman has copies of his
father's translations of
Enrico Verissimo's
Crossroads and The Rest Is
Silence, and Graciliano
Ramos' Anguish, which still
has as a bookmark a ticket
with Lewis Kaplan's name
scrawled in pencil.
After reading a review in
the London Times literary
supplement of Het Voud Der
Verwachting, Kaplan
became interested in the
new Dutch novel by Hella
Haasse. In 1953, he wrote
the author and requested
permission to do the transla-
tion. She agreed.
Haasse's life was as color-
ful as that of the man
thousands of miles away to
whom she was now tied
through Het Voud Der Ver-
wachting.
Born in 1918 in Java, she
became fascinated with the
Middle Ages when, as a
child, she saw a portrait of
Queen Isabeau, later a cen-
tral character in Het Voud
Der Verwachting.
Haasse studied at the Uni-
versity of Amsterdam in
1938, when she began
writing Het Voud Der Ver-
wachting. She was forced to
leave the school the next
year when she refused to
sign a statement pledging
loyalty to the Nazis, who by
then had occupied Holland.
Haasse's first book was
published in 1947, followed
by Het Voud Der Ver-
wachting in 1949. The story
of passion, power and polit-
ical intrigue in the 15th
Century, the book became
an immediate best seller in
the Netherlands.
Kaplan worked tirelessly
on his translation of
Haasse's book. Diagnosed
with a rheumatic heart, he
even took his typewriter and
his manuscript, tucked into
his brown briefcase, when he
went for treatment at the
National Jewish Hospital in
Denver.