Formal Reading Response 3 Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time and Other Stories is a collage of fictional short stories about polish Jews during the Holocaust, each told from different perspectives, which combine to form a truly moving narrative. Similar to Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories is written in a loose, episodic format. It does not tell a linear story from beginning to end, which means it is not constrained by temporality. What sets A Scrap of Time and Other Stories apart from novels like Survival in Auschwitz and This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen are the varied perspectives from which the stories are told. Instead of focusing on
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At a basic level, each story can be seen as a scrap of time because they are presented individually, as pieces of the greater narrative that the author is trying to construct. By focusing on the second part of the above definition, another meaning can be inferred for scraps of time. That is, Ida Fink is telling the untold stories of the Holocaust; the ones that have been separated from the whole and forgotten by most. Rather than focusing on the concentration camps and genocide like her contemporaries Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, Ida Fink focuses on Jews that were in hiding in rural parts of Poland or living in ghettoes, which allows her to further emphasize the individual people that were affected, as well as the destruction of the Jewish …show more content…
By presenting twenty-three unique stories, each with different narrators and characters, Fink captures the heartbreaking scope of the Holocaust, and enhances the reader’s ability to connect with the humans that were victimized. In Behind the Hedge, while describing a massacre that she witnessed, the narrator’s companion Agafia urges that her to accept that “We have to know about it. And look at it. And remember.” (Fink, 17) Ida Fink is imploring the reader to never forget the atrocities that occurred during the
At a basic level, each story can be seen as a scrap of time because they are presented individually, as pieces of the greater narrative that the author is trying to construct. By focusing on the second part of the above definition, another meaning can be inferred for scraps of time. That is, Ida Fink is telling the untold stories of the Holocaust; the ones that have been separated from the whole and forgotten by most. Rather than focusing on the concentration camps and genocide like her contemporaries Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, Ida Fink focuses on Jews that were in hiding in rural parts of Poland or living in ghettoes, which allows her to further emphasize the individual people that were affected, as well as the destruction of the Jewish …show more content…
By presenting twenty-three unique stories, each with different narrators and characters, Fink captures the heartbreaking scope of the Holocaust, and enhances the reader’s ability to connect with the humans that were victimized. In Behind the Hedge, while describing a massacre that she witnessed, the narrator’s companion Agafia urges that her to accept that “We have to know about it. And look at it. And remember.” (Fink, 17) Ida Fink is imploring the reader to never forget the atrocities that occurred during the