Every Friday, an email titled A Personal Anthology arrives in my inbox. It’s a subscription newsletter devised by the writer Jonathan Gibbs, who invites guest editors to compile lists of 12 short stories chosen according to whatever criteria they like. In October an Arkansas-based academic called Dorian Stuber shared his list, and that’s where I first heard of Ida Fink and her story collection A Scrap of Time.
Fink was born in 1921 in Zbaraż, in eastern Poland. (At the end of the second world war the town fell within the Soviet Union’s expanded borders, and is now in Ukraine). She wanted to be a pianist, and was studying at the Lvov Conservatory when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. After that she was confined to the Zbaraż ghetto until 1942, when she and her sister secured counterfeit papers that identified them as Aryans. They spent the rest of the war hiding in plain sight as foreign workers in Nazi Germany.
Fink immigrated to Israel in the 50s, where she began to write fiction based on her experiences of the Holocaust. Her entry in the Jewish Women’s Archive says that editors discouraged her from writing, finding it “too subdued and subtle”. I don’t know how much her style changed between then and the publication of A Scrap of Time, her first book, in 1983 (published in English in 1987, translated from Polish by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose), but subdued isn’t the word I’d use to describe it. It’s unadorned, certainly, but with a stripped leanness of tone that sharpens, rather than muffles, its impact. Consider this, from the book’s opening story:
“At the first shots, our chubby, round-faced cousin David, who was always clumsy at gymnastics and sports, climbed a tree and wrapped his arms around the trunk like a child hugging his mother, and that was the way he died.”
The stories mostly take place in the same unnamed town (Zbaraż, we can assume) in the time of the mass killings perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, when Jews would be summoned to the town square and separated into groups. One group returned home. The other was taken into a nearby wood and murdered. As Timothy Snyder notes in his book Bloodlands, Jews such as those in Zbaraż, east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line that cut occupied Poland in two, were killed “usually by bullets, sometimes by gas”. (To the west of the line, those proportions were reversed.) The extermination camps of Belzec and Auschwitz are mentioned, but Fink does not follow her characters there. They remain zones of menacing silence.
The collection’s title story describes how the monstrous genocidal processes of the SS have overthrown the natural order, defining “this time measured not in months nor by the rising and setting of the sun, but by a word – ‘action’”. The stories’ titles reflect the tight focus of Fink’s gaze: A Conversation, A Dog, The Table, The Pig. The narrow parameters of the stories, most of which are just a handful of pages long, reflect the fact that in this world the course of an individual life could be decided by a single gesture, a moment or a whim. Even more importantly, the stories’ shortness works against the emergence of a coherent overarching shape: these narratives have a fragmentary, overlapping, chaotic quality that reflects the provisional nature of their characters’ lives during the period described.
The brute facts of the Holocaust can make literary criticism seem beside the point, but Fink’s subject matter should not be allowed to overshadow just what a good writer she is. These are superb short stories by any standard. From a purely technical perspective, The Shelter is a classically constructed horror story that is one of the best examples of the genre I’ve ever read. Throughout the collection, the strict economy of Fink’s storytelling is reminiscent of Maupassant, and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories.
Many good books are unjustly forgotten, but that A Scrap of Time should be is more serious. In A Thousand Darknesses, her book about Holocaust writing, Ruth Franklin writes that we need literature about it “not only because testimony is inevitably incomplete, but because of what literature uniquely offers: an imaginative access to past events, together with new and different ways of understanding them that are unavailable to strictly factual forms of writing”. By this measure, a book like A Scrap of Time has a vital part to play in our understanding of the Holocaust. As the recent controversies around The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Tattooist of Auschwitz teach us, there is a real danger that ill-conceived fantasies can infiltrate and usurp historical memory. That problematic books written by people with no personal experience of the Holocaust should be fêted, while a book such as Fink’s has become an obscurity, feels deeply wrong.
