Later we move into the post-Holocaust period when grief-stricken survivors are obsessively trying to locate their loved ones or at least find out what happened to them. She never takes us into the world of the camps: we remain outside on the tormented fringes. "The Garden That Floated Away" elicits readers' keen disappointment, if not righteous indignation, regarding the sorry role of so many bystanders during the Holocaust, their widespread and ultimate indifference and passivity.įink's stories are arranged chronologically within the time frame of the Holocaust years in Poland, beginning with early harassment of Jews to ultimate deportations, disappearances, and death. It is Fink's repeated and brilliant use of this device that helps to account for the intensity, economy, and power of her stories. The neighbors are saying that "we were right to do so, because who knows what would happen to us by winter." Recognizing that "what they were saying was absolutely true," the narrator notes that "the garden of our childhood friend suddenly shuddered, swayed, began to pitch and roll, and slowly, slowly it started to float away, like a huge green ocean liner." Fink uses the garden as an objective correlative, a device whereby an object, a person, event, or situation represents more than itself and thereby elicits an emotional response from the reader. The trees on their "Jewish" side are all bare the family has already eaten the fruit, even when it was green. There is no fence, for they had long ago companionably agreed it "would be an intrusion."īut now, as the narrator overhears their muffled conversation, she realizes that fence or no fence, they are divided: they are in different worlds.
The young narrator sits on the porch steps overlooking two gardens-really the single garden her family has long shared with their non-Jewish friends and neighbors.
A Jewish doctor "on a warm and peaceful afternoon" in summer, negotiates secretly within the confines of his home office for forged documents that might possibly protect his family. 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.
#QUOTES FROM IDA FINK 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.
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