THE FORGOTTEN CROATIAN JEWISH WRITER HINKO GOTTLIEB: SCIENCE FICTION, HUMOUR AND THE HOLOCAUST
The paper presents the hitherto little-known Croatian Jewish writer Hinko Gottlieb (Đurđevac, 1886 – Tel Aviv, 1948). The discussion considers Gottlieb’s multiple affiliation with various national literary corpora and a specific status of a very modest Jewish literary presence in Croatian literature in order to enrich the understanding of his oeuvre. In addition to an overview of what is currently known about his literary work, with an emphasis on his literary production in the 1930s–1940s, special attention is paid to the unpublished play Sanduk iz Perzije (The Chest from Persia), written in 1943 during the author’s internment in the Kraljevica concentration camp, and the novel Ključ od velikih vrata (The Key to the Great Gate), written between 1942–1946, and published for the first time in Croatian in 2021. The play is analysed in the context of the Purim-shpil while the discussion of the novel is based on its manifold genres: prison literature, the Holocaust novel, humorous anti-war fiction similar to Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, and finally, and most importantly, science fiction and the political utopias associated with it.
