Customer Reviews

Pearls and Lace: Poems

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The work only appears to be a simple volume of poems. It is at the same time the decanted expression of a painful life experience. It is the inner view of the Holocaust, lived by a young woman who survived it in its first phase. As the title of the book suggests, it is the fragile private universe of a young girl, shattered abruptly and brutally by history's "tread mill".

In a short documentary style introduction, the editor recreates the biography and portrait of the poems' author. In the spring of 1944 , Magdalena Klein, together with her entire family lived the horrors of daily life in the Jewish Ghetto of Nagyvarad (today Oradea, Romania), from where she was ultimately deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on May 24, 1944.

In reading Magdalena Klein's poems, as a historian, I distinguish, beyond the poetic form in which her ideas are clothed, the slow and irreversible transformation of a young and sensitive spirit under the mutilating impact of a horrific life experience. Hence, the book has most assuredly a documentary value from this point of view as well. This value is further enhanced by the reproduction of eight family photos taken in Marghita and Oradea dating back to the interbellic and immediately postbellic periods.

The thorough knowledge of both, Hungarian and English languages allowed the editor to achieve a faithful translation, without encroaching on the ideatic content.