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.
Critics have long debated whether the coat represents the lost László, the lost Europe, or simply the lost ability to grieve properly. Steinberg, who never gave interviews, left no letters explaining his intentions. But his longtime editor, Miriam Gold, once noted that the author kept a single photograph in his study: a woman in a dark coat, standing on a cobblestone street, her face turned away from the camera. Fur Alma ends not with a catharsis but with a whisper. David donates the coat to a costume shop. The last line: “Somewhere in Queens, a stranger will wear my mother’s ghost to a party, and she will not even know it.”
In the sparse, aching prose that defines Miklos Steinberg’s late work, a single garment becomes the epicenter of grief, migration, and impossible love. Fur Alma By Miklos Steinberg
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.
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. Steinberg, who fled Budapest in 1956, wrote the
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.”
“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. But his longtime editor, Miriam Gold, once noted
And that is why, nearly forty years after its publication, readers still open Steinberg’s slim volume and find themselves, inexplicably, reaching for a coat they have never owned. wrote three story collections and one novel, The Silence of Boilers . Fur Alma is widely considered his masterpiece. A new critical edition, with an introduction by Nicole Krauss, is forthcoming from Archipelago Books.