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Ida Fink 1921- Entry Updated : 02/13/2001 Birth Place: Zbaraz, Poland (now Zbarazh, Ukraine)
Personal Information
Personal Information: Family: Born January 11, 1921, in Zbaraz, Poland (now Zbarazh, Ukraine); immigrated to Israel, 1957; daughter of Ludwik (a physician) and Franciszka (a teacher; maiden name, Stein) Landau; married Bruno Fink (an engineer), March 20, 1948; children: Miriam Fink Nagler. Education: Attended High School of Music, Lwow, Poland, 1938-41. Religion: Jewish. Avocational Interests: Music. Memberships: Association of Writers Writing in Polish in Israel. Addresses: Home: 5 Hashomron, Holon, Israel 58263. Agent: Liepman AG, Maienburgweg 23, 8044 Zurich, Switzerland. Career: Associated with Yad Vashem (Holocaust memorial and museum), Tel Aviv, Israel, 1959-68; worked as a librarian, 1972-82; freelance writer, 1982--. Awards: Anne Frank Prize for Literature, 1985, and Prix Litteraire Wizo, 1990, both for A Scrap of Time. WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
Contributor to anthologies, including Die alte Hagada, [Tuebingen], 1972; Polnische Erzaehlungen aus vierzig Jahren, [Frankfurt], 1986; and Jenseits des Meeres, [Munich], 1988. Contributor to literary journals, including New Yorker, Neue Rundschau, Lettre Internationale, and Tel Aviv Review. Fink's works have been translated into German, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish. Works in Progress: A novel; a collection of stories. "Sidelights"Born in 1921, Jewish writer Ida Fink lived in hiding in her native Poland through much of the Nazi occupation during World War II. After moving to Israel in 1957, Fink began working at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum, recording the memories and experiences of other Jewish survivors. Fink recounts the genocide of her people in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, a semi- autobiographical collection consisting of twenty-two stories and a short play. She delayed writing her tales for more than ten years after the Holocaust, she has indicated, in order to achieve the emotional distance that would allow her to write in the proper voice. In an interview with Eva Hoffman of the New York Times Book Review, the author revealed her approach to writing about such a grim subject. She said, "One ought to present it in a very authentic manner. . . . It seems to me that on this theme, fantasy is harmful."Several of the stories in A Scrap of Time juxtapose the normal calm of life in Poland against the constant threat of violence that became part of life under the Nazis. In the title story, a young boy watches from the safety of a locked room overlooking the village square as Germans round up his fellow Jews. Feeling unbearably isolated, he leaves the room to join his people below, thus bringing about his own eventual death. In "The Key Game" the parents of a toddler teach their young son how to stall for time to give his father the opportunity to hide when the Nazis knock on the door. Critics generally praised the emotional impact of Fink's work, noting that the spareness of her language contributes to the unsettling effect of many of the tales. According to Jayne Pilling of the Times Literary Supplement, the stories are relayed through "superbly but subtly crafted writing." Johanna Kaplan of the New York Times Book Review admired the voices through which the stories are told because they "allow . . . powerful imaginative passage to an unimaginably infernal world." With her 1992 novel The Journey, Fink offered readers an extended narrative rather than a series of short vignettes. The book is the story of two Jewish sisters, an unnamed narrator and her sixteen-year-old sister, in eastern Poland in 1942. As for their actual names, the reader is never quite clear: at various times they pass as Kataryna and Elzbieta, Joanna and Jadwiga, Maria and Barbara. With each new identity comes a different life story as the two young women attempt to disguise themselves and avert what will be certain death if the Nazis discover that they are Jews. The two dream of escape by means of the trains: in a passage often quoted as an example of what Gabriele Annan in the Times Literary Supplement called "Fink's telling choice of detail and economy of language," the narrator recounts that "Until recently, no one had realised that the sounds of the railroad station--two miles away--could be heard so clearly from our town, since all the trains used to arrive and leave during the day. But the new era had brought about nocturnal departures not listed on any schedule, and at night the silence amplified the whistling and the dull, subterranean clatter of wheels. Time and again we stood on the porch, waiting for the signs." Ironically, it is these very trains that are ferrying Jewish prisoners to the Nazi death camps. The protagonists know that death lies to the east, if not at the hands of the Nazis then under the Soviets, so they escape westward--into Germany. Their journey lands them in a work camp, where they manage to pass for non-Jews until the guards become suspicious. But the two girls once again escape, helped--in another irony--by a Nazi camp commandant. They wind up in Heidelberg, seduced by the loveliness of the city. Their very appreciation of German art, which exceeds that of the Germans themselves, points up the absurdity of Hitler's quest to rid the country of its Jews. Annan praised The Journey as "factual, acutely circumstantial, and cool." Readers, Joseph Olshan suggested in a review in the Washington Post Book World, will be "overwhelmed by the power of this gifted writer, who demonstrates the proud tenacity of an oppressed people that, time and again, refused to be vanquished." Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times called The Journey an "unusual novel, singular in its details, universal in its memories." Comparing the work to A Scrap of Time, Daphne Merkin in the Los Angeles Times Book Review noted that although The Journey was "written with the same light-as-a- feather touch" as its predecessor, it "has the feel of something larger, more amassed." Merkin lauded Fink's ability, through her narrator, to speak as someone who "seems to have arrived at an odd truce with the enemy visions of her past." In a comparative review in Nation, Gabriel Motola concluded that "The Journey seeks to reaffirm that the ideals of humanity still matter." With Traces: Stories in 1997, Fink returned to the short story format in a series of tales characterized, like A Scrap of Time, by their juxtaposition of mundane details with the unspeakable horror that forms their backdrop. Fernanda Eberstadt in the New York Times Book Review, noting this juxtaposition, observed that "Fink's bank clerks, accountants, housewives and piano students are rarely heroic. Instead, they are timid, pedantic, irascible. Their very lackluster quality prevents us from making any consoling conclusions about the indomitable nature of the human spirit." Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Salter Reynolds quotes two characteristic lines: from "Zofia," the question "Did you every see someone who was killed in the war but who is still alive?"; and from "Zygmunt," "In those first days I discovered a new fear, the fear of bombs, but that soon seemed childish and silly compared with what came next: the fear of people." Of Fink, Reynolds observed that her "heart must be broken in several places," and yet the author "reveals in these traces that it nonetheless still beats and listens." A critic in Kirkus Reviews concluded that "Few books about the Holocaust are as moving as this one. It seems almost cruel to say so, but one hopes Fink has more stories to tell." FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:BOOKS
PERIODICALS
Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001. Source Database: Contemporary Authors |
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