A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Jewish Lives) [Paperback]

Ida Fink (Author), Francine Prose (Translator), Madeline G. Levine (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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."
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

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.
Copyright 1987 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: 165 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; 1 edition (June 21, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810112590
• ISBN-13: 978-0810112599
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #463,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exceptional collection of short stories, May 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Jewish Lives) (Paperback)

A Scrap of Time is a collection of short stories that masterfully presents the Holocaust experience from the perspective of survivors, witnesses, and victims in the villages of occupied Poland. Acts of personal courage, the day to day decisions that meant life or death, personal attempts to carry on with dignity, are all expressed here in powerful language and moving tales that evoke the Holocaust as it is not often told: as an experience that was as personal as each person who lived it. I have read and re-read this book several times. Each time, the stories seem to resound with their original power. Ida Fink, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust, is a master storyteller. With the very first sentence, she has the ability to create scenes of astonishing clarity and suspense. You simply cannot put the book down until you finish the story. With simple, lyrical language, she creates scenes of tremendous emotional impact. I don't believe I will ever look at the Holocaust in quite the same way. No television documentary could ever do justice to the Holocaust experience as these unforgettable stories of the personal lives of human beings in the most impossible of situations.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ...an anthology of shards from a broken world..., May 16, 2004

By 

Karen L. Simonetti "The Nonesuch Librarian" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Jewish Lives) (Paperback)

Though the concentration camps are never mentioned, these 23 short stories are a haunting collection about life in Poland at the time of the Holocaust. The theme of the anthology is on the excruciating agony of life in a broken world. These are stories of resistance, submission, betrayal, hope, regret and remembering.

Each story is the nightmare of an otherwise quiet ordinary people, previously living a secure and ordered existence. What is most striking is the uniqueness of the tone and style in each short story; and that none of the stories talk of the camps, only the horror before and after.

Perhaps, the author's own words (see below) taken from the first, title story captures why this collection is ultimately crucial to an impression, an understanding of those times. [Recommended for Young Adults/Adults]

[quote]
I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn't, I didn't know how. I was afraid, too, that this second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within me. But no. Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched from forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word--we no longer said "in the beautiful month of May," but "after the first "action," or the second, or right before the third." We had different measures of time, we different ones, always different, always with that mark of difference that moved some of us to pride and others to humility. We, who because of our difference were condemned once again, as we had been before in our history, we were condemned once again during this time measured not in months nor by the rising and setting of the sun, but by a word--"action," a word signifying movement, a word you would use about a novel or a play.
[/end quote]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most remarkable collections of stories I have ever read, October 26, 2011

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Jewish Lives) (Paperback)

These masterful small stories written in a poetic, restrained non- sentimental way are extraordinarily powerful. The opening title story 'A Scrap of Time' supplies the locus for a good share of them. The 'scrap of time' is the time of an 'Aktion' in which Jews will be rounded up and killed by Nazis. Here the setting is one small town and what happens to a number of different individuals and families in the town. There are stories about those waiting for the Nazis to come, stories about hiding and evading the Nazis, stories about the aftermath, the return home of a surviving few. Each of the stories is in itself a small work of art, often turning or ending in surprise.
I am reluctant to describe or try to summarize any of these stories because I would not do them justice. Their revelations of horror and cruelty are somehow made more startingly real by being presented in the context of everyday life of ordinary people.