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.
“She never wore it,” David recalls. “But she never sold it. It was the one thing she refused to sacrifice.” What makes Fur Alma remarkable is not its plot—which is, by Steinberg’s design, skeletal—but its relationship to texture and temperature. The story is obsessed with the sensation of cold. Alma’s journey from Vienna to Budapest to a displaced persons’ camp to the Bronx is rendered not in dates or border crossings but in chapped hands, frozen pipes, and the way her breath plumes in unheated train cars. Fur Alma By Miklos Steinberg
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. There is a moment in Fur Alma —the
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. She simply stares
The coat, then, is a paradox: a symbol of the warmth she never allows herself to feel. Late in the story, David tries it on. It is too large for him, and the fur, now brittle, sheds onto his sweater. “I looked like a monster,” he says, “or a child playing dress-up in a dead woman’s skin.”