Ladislav Grosman

Ladislav Grosman (4 February 1921 in Humenné – 25 January 1981 in Tel Aviv) was a Slovak novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for being the author of The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze), which he adapted into a critically acclaimed Academy Award-winning film in 1965. Grosman became proficient in Czech after he moved to Czechoslovakia's Czech-speaking part in his late twenties, where he worked as a correspondent and editor in the Prague bureau of the Slovak newspaper Pravda. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he moved to Israel, where he died in 1981.

Grosman was born to a Slovak Jewish family, the son of a tanner and owner of a small shop selling leather and belts. His parents and three of his five siblings were killed during a German bombing of Ružomberok in 1944. He attended the gymnasium in Michalovce from 1932-1939, but only graduated in 1945, after the end of World War II. After the establishment of the Slovak State he worked as a worker in a brick factory in Humenné, and was forced into military service without weapons (on racial grounds), and was eventually deported to a forced labor camp in Banská Bystrica. He worked as a digger, a laborer in a brick factory and in the tobacco fields, until the Slovak National Uprising, when he went into hiding.

Grosman returned to the liberated Humenné in March, 1945, but moved to Prague in September of that year. Graduating with an Engineer's degree from the Political and Social University in 1949, he subsequently found employment for three years as a book reviewer in the Slovak publishing house Pravda. He was a long term friend of writers Arnošt Lustig and Gabriel Laub. From 1953 to 1959 he worked as an editor in the publishing house Slovenská kniha (Slovak Book) and simultaneously he studied educational psychology at the Pedagogical University. He earned his PhD at Charles University in Prague. Initially, he wrote in Slovak, but in the mid-1950s he switched to Czech.

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