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Translated by Madeline G. Levine

From Publishers Weekly:

The grim and the surreal portentously collide in Krall's 12 genre-bending pieces, all shadowed by the brutal facts of the Holocaust. In "Hamlet," Andrzej Czajkowski, a Polish piano impresario and composer who survived WWII as a child hiding in wardrobes, bequeaths his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the supernatural "Dybbuk," an American professor of architecture tries to exorcise the tormented spirit of his half-brother, who disappeared in a Jewish ghetto. "Phantom Pain" draws the life of Alex von dem B., a German officer who lost a leg on the Eastern front and plotted to assassinate Hitler after witnessing a massacre of Jews. Conspiracies resurface in "The Back of the Eye"—backlit by Cold War terrorism and the violence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang—in which Stefan, the son of a concentration camp survivor, serves a life sentence for a 1977 abduction and murder. A lineage mystery centers the fine folkloric title tale, though digressive genealogies obfuscate and confuse minor and major characters elsewhere. These investigations are stitched with information culled from diverse sources: interviews, an encyclopedia, state archives, diary entries, photographs and letters. Krall's (Shielding the Flame, etc.) prose is compressed, unadorned and journalistic. Braiding history with imagination, she produces necessary accounts that incisively unveil and interrogate the ruptured historical legacy of Jews after WWII.

Elena Lappin, New York Times Book Review:

Elegant, multi-layered narratives….Krall's deceptively artless prose speaks of real events with the power of fiction.

Boston Globe:

Powerful, unadorned prose…a few simple words create thousands of indelible images.

Carol Herman, Washington Times:

Often, Krall writes more like a poet than a journalist…This powerful book, with all its sorrows and its questions, illuminates.

Book Description:

In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing would reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man refuses to let go of the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He never knew the boy, yet he learns Polish to communicate with his dybbuk. A high-ranking German officer conceives of a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland. Through Krall's adroit and journalistic style, her reader is thrown into a world where love, hatred, compassion, and indifference appear in places where we least expect them, illuminating the implacable logic of the surreal.

About the Author:

Hanna Krall was born in Warsaw in 1937 and was a reporter for Polityka from 1957 until 1981, when martial law was imposed and her publications were banned. The recipient of numerous international literary awards, her books have been translated into 15 languages. She lives in Warsaw. Madeline G. Levine was Czeslaw Milosz's prose translator. Her translation of Ida Fink's A Scrap of Time and Other Stories was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.