cover image Facing the Holocaust: Selected Israeli Fiction

Facing the Holocaust: Selected Israeli Fiction

. Jewish Publication Society of America, $24.95 (292pp) ISBN 978-0-8276-0253-3

Everything has been lost to the survivors telling their stories here except a bit of life, and that bit cowers always in the shadow of distressful death. Even when, as in David Scutz's ""Mrs. Eckhardt's Story,'' the narrator seems detached as he tells about Lotte-Miriam, whose husband disappears and who herself finally drifts away, leaving her children behind, the reader is caught up in the pain of the denouement. Less straightforward, ``Twilight'' by Shulamith Hareven begins, ``Last night I spent a year in the city where I was born.'' A woman watches gaiety inexorably diminish, marries, bears a child who grows up and departs, and finally in turmoil wakes from her dream to the reality of today's life and yesterday's tragedy. The most poignant tale is Uri Orlev's ``The Lead Soldiers,'' in which two little boys, incarcerated in an attic for the war's duration, play their battle games and pray for deliverance to the Christian God they have been taught to revere. Beautifully told, these narratives kindle a glow out of the ashes of destruction. (March)