This chapter reviews Ida Fink's A Scrap of Time. It is a collection which consists of twenty-three stories that offer a haunting, uncompromising view of life in Poland during the Holocaust. The book includes scraps of ordinary lives that have been disrupted and terminated, and many of the stories are narrative slices of family, friends, or helpless bystanders. Here, the stories in A Scrap of Time illustrate Fink's artistry in describing the dilemmas, conflicts, and crises of ordinary families facing the Nazi threat. The stories include no crematoria, no selections, and no merciless views of life in the camps, but their absence does not mitigate the sadness, futility, and the omnipresent ‘why’. The chapter reveals how these are spare, quiet stories that disturb in a far more upsetting way, for they threaten our very beliefs in an essential human dignity and innocence. In addition to the book review, the chapter also provides a brief biography of Ida Fink as well as more focused analyses on some of the stories in the collection.
Book Review: The Holocaust and Gender: Remediation and Compensation