The key to the great gate

The Key to the Great Gate is a full-blooded genre hybrid, a combination of prison novel, history of concentration camps, humor, picaresque novels and science fiction, created at a time when similar literary processes were still in their infancy. The novel takes place in a Viennese prison cell during the Second World War, during three days. It tells about the mysterious Dov Tarnopolski, a Polish Jew, a physicist, who is one day brought to a prison cell in which the narrator, the Viennese lawyer Hans Anton Strauss, a timid Christianized Jew, and a Rabbi are. Tarnopolski is a completely atypical character for this type of literature: cheeky, witty and superior to the prison guards in everything. He is also the constructor of the "space condensation machine", with which he creates his "private cosmos", in which nothing is impossible: chocolate cake, liquor, a live rooster, a concert piano, and even a whole house from Warsaw suburb appear in the cell. Masterfully written, with themes akin to those in Vonnegut’s Jailbird and a main character similar to Woland in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, The Key to the Great Gate is a hidden gem, a rediscovered classic.

The novel The Key to the Great Gate was written twice by Hinko Gottlieb. After the manuscript was lost for the first time, during wartime and camp relocations, he was able to reconstruct it anew, and finished the book in Bari and in Palestine. The novel was then translated into English and published in New York in 1947 by Simon and Schuster. The book received favourable reviews, but in fact, remained unnoticed. When reading it today, it can seem to us that this novel is one of those prose works that were missing in the mosaic of the Croatian language and all its literature.

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