Synopses & Reviews
Finalist, National Jewish Book Award 1997
A New York Times Notable Book
Ida Fink's first collection of short stories, A Scrap of Time, was universally hailed as a masterpiece. Traces continues Fink's portrait of life in Nazi-occupied Poland, of men and women otherwise buried in the anonymous statistics of war and genocide.
It is Fink's special art to show that even the Holocaust had its everyday life, where death and daily routine shared the same cramped quarters. In spare, intense prose, Fink records the modest acts of courage, and the delicate shifts in consciousness amidst unimaginable horror. She shows us as well the survivors' desperate search for traces or clues: a torn piece of paper, a half-forgotten address, initials carved into a windowsill, any mention, any at all, of a loved one. At once ter and unsparing, elegiac and ironic, these seemingly simple stories present the complexity of life as it was lived in the darkest days of our century.
Review
"Brilliant. . . . It has become Fink's vocation to preserve this extinguished world in a prose whose subtlety and precision heighten the plangency of her subjects' intolerable ends."--The New York Times Book Review
"There is an almost musical quality about Ida Fink's writing that allows the ironies of these stories to echo profoundly with the unspoken and the unspeakable."--The Boston Globe
Review
"It has become Ida Fink's vocation to preserve this extinguished world, these snipped-off lives, in a prose whose subtlety and precision heighten the plangency of her subjects' intolerable ends. "-The New York Times Book Review
"Ida Fink's spectacular stories tell of the Holocaust in distilled, elliptical moments that hint at the unsayable enormity of what happened."-Elle
About the Author
Ida Fink is the author of A Scrap of Time ("remarkable," New York Times) and The Journey ("a gift," the New Yorker). Born in Poland in 1921, she lived in a ghetto throughout 1942 and went into hiding until the of the war.