IDA FINK QUOTES HOW TO

This is not to say that she has not used fantasy to make a point, as in the stunningly surrealistic ending to 'The Garden That Floated Away.' One of the early stories in the collection, it focuses on the time before the mass deportations when Jews were still desperately seeking means of escape. 'It seems to me that on this theme fantasy is harmful.' One ought to present the Holocaust 'in a very authentic manner,' she says. In important ways, it is all unimaginable, inconceivable. One should not-and perhaps as we may speculate, cannot - make up stories about what happened during the Holocaust.

IDA FINK QUOTES HOW TO

The town in the stories, for example, 'is always the same town, the garden is our garden.' The dog, Ching, who would not betray the family's hiding place, belonged to Fink's real-life family the three-year-old in 'The Key Game,' pathetically practicing how to postpone opening the door for the police until after his father was hidden, was in fact the son of Fink's husband.

Almost all her stories are autobiographical they are based either on her own experiences or those of people she knew and talked to. Here some three-and-a-half million Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered as part of the Third Reich's Final Solution.īorn in Poland in 1921, Fink is herself a survivor of both the ghetto and of years in hiding.

The world she conjures up unveils the pitiless, harrowing world of the Holocaust as it unfolded in Nazi-occupied Poland-day by horrifying day. A SCRAP OF TIME AND OTHER STORIES (Skrawek czasu)įirst published in Polish in 1983 and in English in 1987 (revised, 1995), Ida Fink's A Scrap of Time and Other Stories is a remarkable and powerful collection of 22 very short stories.

Ida fink quotes