The Devil's Own Luck by Ladislav Grosman

The Devil's Own Luck by Ladislav Grosman

Ladislav Grosman's powerful story of a twelve-year-old Jewish boy in wartime Slovakia smuggled into Hungary to escape deportation. 

In The Devil's Own Luck, readers experience the horrors of war and the Holocaust through the lens of the young boy's obsessive reading of pulp fiction, imposing a layer of adventure on the bleak landscape of his experience. This simultaneously tragic, humorous, and poetic novel by Ladislav Grosman was published posthumously.

Ladislav Grosman (1921–1981) was a Slovak Jewish novelist and screenwriter. During World War II, he was sent to a forced labor camp, and much of his family perished. After the war, he studied in Prague and worked as an editor and lecturer. He adapted his own prose into the Academy Award–winning film The Shop on Main Street (1965) and later worked at Barrandov Film Studio. Following his emigration to Israel in 1968, he taught Slavic literature and creative writing in Tel Aviv. David Short is an acclaimed translator of numerous books from Czech and Slovak to English.