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Although not a long story, “Post to the Promised Land” weaves together history, psychology, biography, and art. The story is set during the early 1940s in France and Palestine. The “promised land” is both a real place and a psychic state, both of which, Seghers suggests, can best be approached through writing. “Post to the Promised Land” is a masterpiece of psychological subtlety, written by an author with unsurpassed insight into lives shattered by war, exile, and catastrophic loss. The story occurs during the Holocaust, but it also speaks to our contemporary world, where revolutionary technological breakthroughs, leading to instantaneous communication, cannot replace older forms of communication, particularly writing.
Despite its brevity, “Post to the Promised Land” has an epical sweep, and the narrator has omniscient insight into her characters' minds and hearts. Three generations of the Grünbaum family have been victimized, first by pogroms in their small Polish town, and then by the Nazis. Nathan Levi's young pregnant wife dies not from the kicks or blows she witnessed when Cossacks murdered her two brothers at the end of the nineteenth century, but from the consequences of a premature birth. After her death, her parents, parents-in-law, husband, and infant son, Jacob, travel first to Vienna, where they are unenthusiastically greeted by her sole surviving sibling, a sister whom everyone regarded as insufferable, and then to Silesia, where they are reluctantly accepted by a distant relative. Then they move to Paris, where they enjoy a few peaceful years before the darkness of the Holocaust envelops their lives. Seghers's understanding of the plight of refugees could not be timelier.
A keen psychologist, Seghers has the ability to capture in a single sentence a character's defining detail or ambiguity.