A number of stories keenly depict the pariah status of survivors at the war's end. And in ``A Conversation,'' a couple's safety hangs on the wife's acquiescence to the husband's love affair with their Christian protector. ![]() In the title story, the narrator's young cousin abandons his hiding place during an ""action'' or roundup: ``That impatience of the heart, that trembling of the nerves, the burden of isolation, condemned him to extermination.'' Make-believe has a real-life ulterior motive in ``The Key Game'' parents train their three-year-old son to pretend and tell outsiders that his father, who is evading deportation, is dead. Fink, who records the memories of Holocaust survivors at Yad Vashem, bases her stories on authentic, partially autobiographical material, focusing on the excruciating uncertainty of Jews in hiding rather than death camp physical atrocities. This is a jarring, powerful debut by a 66-year-old Israeli author who escaped from a Polish ghetto during the Nazi occupation and lived underground throughout the war's duration. The short stories "A Conversation" and "A Spring Morning" were adapted into a 2008 film titled Spring 1941.The tension evoked by these 23 seminal Holocaust tales, deftly translated from Polish, is sharpened by their brevity and lack of sentimentality. The stories in the collection are as follows: Metaphorically, since the war is man-made, it is of no concern to the natural world. The Natural world seems to exist outside of the war, but around the war at the same time. Grass grows above and around the fallen bodies. The birds can be heard singing between the gunfire. ![]() The other stories typically take place in the Spring time or in the Morning, when everything is becoming alive. Only once in the 165 pages of short stories is there a reference to Nature making a revolt (which in found in *). "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.There are several references to the SS soldiers to being pigs. The animals found in various stories, take on the role of protecting or guiding the Jewish victims. The SS soldiers act as brutal killers, void of humanity. "Animals Being More Human the Humanity" is the idea that the animals are more human than the humans in Fink's stories.They no longer continue to struggle, but rather follow instructions, as commanded, to their death. 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. ![]()
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