19. Klutz (2025) – Tom Hastings

2025. Paperback publication, creative non-fiction 

Klutz is a dazzling, unsettling work of memoir, travel writing, and
cultural criticism that begins in the Holocaust Centre North
Archive in Huddersfield and leads to the haunted streets of Berlin.
Midway through a residency, Tom Hastings discovers that his
grandmother once lived just a short walk from Else Lubranczyk, a
Jewish seamstress whose letters—preserved in the archive—were
written to her daughter who fled Nazi Germany in 1939, a year
after Hastings’ own grandmother.

Else and her niece, Steffi Levy, were deported to Theresienstadt
in 1943. Following the traces left in Else’s letters—of ordinary life,
longing, recrimination, and attempts to escape—Hastings walks
the streets, visits the shops, and reads the memorial plaques that
now mark a vanished world.

What unfolds is a deeply personal journey: a reckoning with Jewish
inheritance, uneasy memory, and the crackdown on solidarity. Klutz
is about stumbling toward something and not getting there—and
finding something else instead.

With thanks to Barry Anysz whose collection features in this work.
Courtesy of Holocaust Centre North Archive.


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