A Tale of One January

A screenwriter and novelist blacklisted for his involvement with the Communist Party and jailed for refusing to testify about it, Maltz (The Cross and the Arrow) based his final novel on his 1960 interviews with a Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, Dounia Wasserstrom. It follows two women (Lini and Claire) and four men (Otto, Jurek, Andrej, and Norbert) who in 1945 escape from a Nazi death march and take refuge in an abandoned Polish factory. Though they are emaciated and traumatized, speak different languages, and come from different backgrounds, the group unites with a grimly celebratory air. As they share their stories and care for one another, they cautiously allow long-suppressed emotions, from joy to desire to sorrow, to surface. Narrator Rupert Degas provides a stunning performance, employing shifts in tone and pacing to communicate all that is not said—a hesitation when Otto recognizes the severity of Claire’s frozen foot, the palpable anguish when the group glimpses themselves in a mirror. Degas’s accent work is superb, moving gracefully from Russian to German to Polish to French, while allowing Maltz’s words rather than performative flourishes to take center stage.