The Journey [Paperback]

Ida Fink (Author), Joanna Weschler (Translator), Francine Prose (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1992

Autumn, 1942. Disguised as Polish peasants, two sisters flee the ghetto and embark on a daring journey to work as hired labour in the factories and farms of wartime Germany. But it is late, and the Gestapo know that Jews have been obtaining false papers and enlisting as volunteer workers.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With this deeply moving, masterfully controlled novel, Fink, a Jewish writer who was born in Poland in 1921, continues her exploration of survival during the Holocaust (begun in the story collection A Scrap of Time ). Two Jewish sisters armed only with poorly forged papers escape a Polish ghetto; their real names are never given, and the narrator, the older sister, instead uses the various aliases they assume. Posing as Christians, they report to a transit camp to be sent to work in Germany. Danger is never far from them, however, and they are forced into a series of escapes and changes of identity. Fink excels at locating the tiny details that carry fatal consequences: Polish factory workers, suspecting the sisters, challenge them to sing Christmas carols; a farmhand doesn't contradict the narrator's claim to be an experienced milkmaid even when he sees the raw blisters on her hands; the narrator, still posing as a peasant, must concoct a cover story after she impulsively plays Chopin's "Polonaise" on the piano. The author's restrained, unsurprised tones suggest how routine, how everyday the brutalities of the Nazi regime must have seemed, even to its victims. Deceptively fluid, Fink's novel is utterly chilling.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

As in her collection A Scrap of Time ( LJ 8/87), winner of the first Anne Frank Prize for Literature, Fink tells the story of Holocaust survivors, portraying the lives of ordinary people as they are forced to confront the unimaginable. In 1942, two Jewish sisters flee the Polish ghetto disguised as peasants. They risk their lives on a journey into enemy territory to look for work in the factories, farms, and villages of wartime Germany, in increasing danger as the Gestapo's cruel search for Jews with false papers intensifies. The author offers extraordinary insights into the lives of people in hiding: how they distinguish friends from enemies, maintain their identities, and survive in a world gone mad. Despite her grim subject matter, she champions human loyalty and remains sensitive to the beauty of the landscape. This beautifully written novel masterfully achieves a tenuous balance between power and restraint.
-Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374701245
• ISBN-13: 978-0374701246
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #499,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Howard- student review, December 12, 2006

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J. Howard - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Journey (Paperback)

The Journey (1992), written by Ida Fink, is a historical novel depicting two Jewish sisters attempting to escape from Poland into Germany to avoid Nazi persecution during the 1940's. Translated from Yiddish by Joanna Weschler and Francine Prose, the story conveys the truth about the Holocaust through the eyes of eldest sister, Katarzyna. Ida Fink's ultimate theme throughout the novel is the immense courage and strength one must possess in order to create her own destiny instead of surrendering to life's given obstacles.

Ida Fink, a Holocaust survivor, was born in Zbaraz (currently in the Ukraine) into a Jewish family in 1920. Similar to the sisters, Fink escaped from Poland in 1942 into Germany disguised as a Polish farm worker. It is through her first-hand experience that Fink writes, adding an autobiographical flair to her novel. Now, she lives in Israel where she writes, in Polish, solely about the Holocaust. Fink has also written two other short fiction books: A Scrap of Time (1987) and Traces (1996).

In this particular novel, the story closely follows two young Jewish sisters attempting to survive by hiding in Germany during the 1940's. In the beginning, it seemed fairly simple; these two Jewish girls would receive new identification as Polish volunteer workers traveling to Germany. It turns out that this was the easiest step, and it only became more complicated with each passing day. As the girls are forced to continuously change their identities in order to survive, Fink chooses to emphasize Katarzyna's uneasy feelings towards acting unlike herself by purposefully switching the narration between first and third person. Even if she is not acting like herself, Katarzyna takes on every new complication with courage, optimism, and a little luck from her broken horseshoe.

With each new obstacle, Katarzyna faces it with the utmost courage and optimism. While stationed in the transit camp, the sisters are under high suspicion of the Gestapo. By staging a sudden outburst that a typical Polish peasant would under the circumstances, Katarzyna is practically forced to leave the room. She "didn't know this litany of curses, together with [her] throwing the documents down on the table before anyone even asked for them, that all of this would help [her] more than the best identity card and rubber stamps." Obviously, this incident gives light into the real horrors that could happen at any moment to the Jews. Through this specific situation, Katarzyna's personality is revealed as she uses her brave instincts, like always, and takes complete control of the situation which ultimately enables both her and her sister to leave the Gestapo's office unharmed and to continue on their journey.

As a whole, I feel that this book is immensely successful and effective. In comparison to other Holocaust novels I have read, such as The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal and All But My Life by Gerda Klein, this novel gave me a more tangible perspective of this devastating historical event; something the cold hard facts just could not do. I would recommend this book to both those studying the Holocaust and those who are not, for the impact will be unforgotten nevertheless.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A rare p.o.v.: Jews who flee into Germany, September 23, 2005

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John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Journey (Paperback)

Reading Simon Weisenthal's obituary just before Fink's presumably autobiographically based novel, I was struck in both cases (as in Art Speigelman's Maus) how the protagonists had evaded certain doom over and over again, seemingly by chance. When the narrator, whose name changes so often that, by the end of the book, you like her may have forgotten her original identity, mulls over how her prayer was only "please not yet" in crisis and nothing more, you realize how much of a role fate had in who survived and who did not.

The relentlessness of the extermination, here not in the camps but in everyday life for those who manage to disguise, if for a time, their Jewishness, reveals itself in the constant danger of exposure, not only by the Germans but by the Poles who might stumble upon the truth about the narrator and her accomplices from back home. Even as they escape the ghetto for Germany as slave laborers, they cannot fully trust their own fellow nationals. Accents, mundane details, imagined native cities and schools, catechisms, hymns and Christmas celebrations, relatives of potential informers who knew them in their homeland: all of these factors never ease but briefly, no matter how far they seem from their origins, posing as one invented character after another.

This strain of brazenly acting--even before the Gestapo--so often as to (nearly?) obliterate one's true self makes the tension of this novel interiorized as well as represented in the often sparely but grippingly related events. I had heard an excerpt from this novel read on NPR, knowing nothing of the author, back on publication in 1992, and have never forgotten it. A small shortcoming is the telescoping of events at the close, and an afterward that seems too awkwardly expressed. But the force of this clearly told, unsentimentalized, and very immediate novel makes for a fresh take on events from a less memorialized perspective: of those who went underground within the Reich to survive. Ida Fink has written two other collections of sketches and stories based on real events, and deserves your attention for her careful craft.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding, July 24, 2005

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David Rabenowitz (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Journey (Paperback)

Ida Fink has written a memorable novel that appears to be autobiographical. She follows the wartime life of two sisters as they attempt to escape capture in wartime Germany. Her description of their encounters with ordinary German citizens as well as police and SS at times had me reaching for the next page to see if they made it. This book showed me another way that Jews survived WWII.