A Scrap of Time and Other Stories,written by Ida Fink

Ida Fink

Ida Fink 1 November 1921 – 27 September 2011) was an Israeli Polish-language Jewish author who wrote about the Holocaust.-Biography:Ida Fink was born in Zbaraż, Poland in 1 November 1921. Her father was a physician, and her mother worked as a teacher in a local school. She was a student of...

, is a collection of fictional short stories relating various characters to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Originally written in Polish, it was translated by Madeline Levine

Madeline Levine

Madeline Levine, Ph. D., is a practicing psychologist in Marin County. She is the author of three books: Viewing Violence published in 1996, See No Evil: A Guide to Protecting Our Children from Media Violence published in 1998, and The Price of Privilege: how parental pressure and material...

 and Francine Prose

Francine Prose

Francine Prose is an American writer. Since March 2007 she has been the president of PEN American Center. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991....

. The novel won the first Anne Frank Prize

Anne Frank Prize

The Anne Frank Prize was a literary award that was given out in the Netherlands in the years 1957 to 1966 by The Netherlands-America Foundation....

, as well as the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize

PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize

The PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize is an annual award given to outstanding translations into the English language. It has been presented annually by PEN American Center and the Book of the Month Club since 1963....

. Published in 1987, this novel illustrates the continuing effect of the Holocaust on the Jewish psyche.
Image donated by Northwestern University Press

Northwestern University Press

Northwestern University Press is the university press of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA.- History :Northwestern University Press was founded in 1893, at first specializing in legal periodicals. Today, the Press publishes scholarly books of fiction, non-fiction, and literary...

 http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Themes and motifs

• "Tramatized Language", an idea coined by Brinkley and Arsenault, is the idea that language can no longer be the same, as it was, before the experience of trauma, in particular, that of the Holocaust. This is because World War II
  World War II
  World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
  
   has created a global effect on the world's psyche, and therefore, words have failed to express the terrors of such events. Even, once such simple, romantic notions, like "tree", have taken on a sinister connotation. To a survivor, a tree may connote lynching, therefore the word has become tramatized. A Scrap of Time is filled will such tramatized language.

• "Life versus Death" is a key theme to understanding the Holocaust. In this collection, it relates to how the living become dead, before they are killed - meaning that the living, after losing all sense of hope, lose their will to live. They no longer continue to struggle, but rather follow instructions, as commanded, to their death.

• "Animals Being More Human the Humanity" is the idea that the animals are more human than the humans in Fink's stories. The SS soldiers act as brutal killers, void of humanity. The animals found in various stories, take on the role of protecting or guiding the Jewish victims. There are several references to the Polish SS soldiers to being pigs.

• "Nature's Revolt, or the Refusal of Nature's Revolt" is the idea that though such terrible events are occurring everyday (in the novel) Nature continues as if nothing is wrong. Only once in the 165 pages of short stories is there a reference to Nature making a revolt (which in found in *). The other stories typically take place in the Spring time or in the Morning, when everything is becoming alive. The birds can be heard singing between the gunfire. Grass grows above and around the fallen bodies. The Natural world seems to exist outside of the war, but around the war at the same time. Metaphorically, since the war is man-made, it is of no concern to the natural world.

The list of short stories

The stories in the collection are as follows:

• A Scrap of Time
• The Garden That Floated Away
• Behind the Hedge
• '*****'
• A Dog
• Jean-Christophe
• The Key Game
• A Spring Morning
• A Conversation
• The Black Beast
• Aryan Papers
• Inspector von Galoshinsky
• The Pig
• Titina
• Night of Surrender
• The Tenth Man
• Crazy
• Jump!
• The Other Shore
• Splinter
• The Shelter
• Traces
• The Table