A Scrap of Time and Other Stories / Edition 2

by Ida Fink, Francine Prose, Madeline G. Levine

Overview

Named a New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
Winner of the Anne Frank Prize

These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable: a couple who must decide what to do with their five-year-old daughter as the Gestapo come to march them out of town; a wife whose safety depends on her acquiescence in her husband's love affair; a girl who must pay a grim price for an Aryan identity card.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810112599
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	06/21/1995
Series:	Jewish Lives
Edition description:	1
Pages:	165
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

IDA FINK (1921–2011) was an Israeli Polish-language Jewish author who wrote about the Holocaust.

Editorial Reviews

"A masterful collection . . . Fink's carefully wrought, almost sculptured images will—must—become part of the reader's own memory and imagination." —Boston Globe


"There is an immediacy in the telling which suggests an urgent impulse regulated by the discipline of the short form; a series of discrete incidents are built into something profoundly resonant . . . superbly but subtly crafted writing." —Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

Translated from the Polish by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, this collection of stories about life in Poland during World War II focuses on the mundane details of survival.

Jewish Book World

The tension evoked by these 23 seminal Holocaust tales, deftly translated from Polish, is sharpened by their brevity and lack of sentimentality. This is a jarring, powerful debut by a 66-year-old Israeli author who escaped from a Polish ghetto during the Nazi occupation and lived underground throughout the war's duration. Fink, who records the memories of Holocaust survivors at Yad Vashem, bases her stories on authentic, partially autobiographical material, focusing on the excruciating uncertainty of Jews in hiding rather than death camp physical atrocities. In the title story, the narrator's young cousin abandons his hiding place during an ``action'' or roundup: ``That impatience of the heart, that trembling of the nerves, the burden of isolation, condemned him to extermination.'' Make-believe has a real-life ulterior motive in ``The Key Game''; parents train their three-year-old son to pretend and tell outsiders that his father, who is evading deportation, is dead. And in ``A Conversation,'' a couple's safety hangs on the wife's acquiescence to the husband's love affair with their Christian protector. A number of stories keenly depict the pariah status of survivors at the war's end. In ``The Shelter,'' well-meaning peasants horrify their Jewish friends because they have included a hiding-place for them in their newly built home ``just in case something happens.'' (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Stories told by a survivor about events in Poland at the time of the Holocaust make up this devastating collection. With masterful foreshadowing (the reader knows what annihilation will occur) Fink portrays the lives of ordinary people as they are forced to confront the unimaginable. In the title story, a recent New Yorker selection, the author writes of a roundup of Jews in her peaceful village that she and her sister witnessed as they skipped stones on the Gniezna River. Another story tells of a couple who must decide what to do with their five-year-old daughter as the Gestapo comes to march them out of town. The death camps are a looming presence here, though they are never depicted and rarely mentioned; a tenuous balance between power and restraint is sustained. Highly recommended. Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.

Library Journal