The coat, we learn, was purchased in 1938. Not as a luxury, but as a betrothal gift. Alma’s fiancé, a Viennese doctor named László, bought it from a Jewish furrier who would later vanish. László himself would disappear into a labor camp. Alma, pregnant with another man’s child (David’s father, a pragmatic baker she married for papers), kept the coat anyway.
In the end, Fur Alma is not a story about the Holocaust. It is not a story about immigration or poverty or even love. It is a story about what we carry, and what carries us, long after the reason for carrying has turned to dust. Fur Alma By Miklos Steinberg
In the sparse, aching prose that defines Miklos Steinberg’s late work, a single garment becomes the epicenter of grief, migration, and impossible love. The coat, we learn, was purchased in 1938
There is a moment in Fur Alma —the Hungarian-born author’s most quietly devastating story—when the narrator’s mother opens a mildewed steamer trunk in a Bronx walk-up. Inside, wrapped in acid-free paper that has yellowed to the color of old teeth, lies a sable coat. The mother does not touch it. She simply stares. Then she closes the lid. László himself would disappear into a labor camp
That scene, lasting barely two paragraphs, encapsulates everything Steinberg does best: turning the domestic into the monumental. At its simplest level, Fur Alma (published posthumously in the 1987 collection The Seventh Suitcase ) follows a son, David, tasked with clearing out his deceased mother’s apartment. The “Alma” of the title is both the mother’s name and the Spanish word for “soul.” This bilingual pun is deliberate. Steinberg, who fled Budapest in 1956, wrote the story in English, but its rhythms remain deeply Central European—formal, melancholic, and freighted with double meaning.
That line devastates not because it is cruel, but because it is true. Steinberg understands that objects outlive our intentions for them. A coat meant to warm a bride becomes a relic, then a curiosity, then a costume. Alma’s soul, her alma , is not in the sable—it is in the decision to keep it, to hide it, to never quite let go.