These eleven stories from Polish writer Hanna Krall are quite haunting portraits of lives in the shadow of Nazi atrocities. Hanna Krall writes in a very particular style, an extremely dense prose. Famed critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki once quipped that the famously terse prose of Hemingway is like a chatterbox when compared to that of Krall.
Standout stories of this collection is one about a adult woman recalling her second mother and real mother, who arranged for her to be hidden with a non-Jewish woman (a fate that also befell Krall herself during the war). This woman then pretended it was her own child, and the story very powerfully explores the subsequent feelings of loss and grief from both mother and daughter. Another story is about a man who survived the death camp of Sobibor, and his return to those grounds after having lived in America for a long time. I could actually recognize who the story is about without it being mentioned, because I had seen a documentary film about the very same man not too long ago. Toivo Blatt, in the film by Peter Nestler, returns to Poland to see the area again. Krall does a very good job of conveying his personality in words. A notable story towards the end is about God telling a writer that writing is only a joke. It is a collection of about 250 pages, but I read it concomitantly with three other Krall publications, totaling a whooping 700 pages (but that’s nothing compared to a collected volume published in Poland 2017 called Fantom bólu: 1224 pages). Phantom pain is also the name of a story in this collection, about a conspiracy among Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler, that unfortunately failed. She located those involved in the plot and spun her story from interviews and research. I get the feeling that all her stories are based on real cases, and then embellished and edited to the form of short stories. It is a very transporting style of writing. A lot of the themes revolve around grief and loss, and several stories involve adoption and wartime estrangement between children and parents. The stories are filled with little observations and details that really add to the bigger picture. I was enamoured of Krall’s writing so much that I read four of her books back to back, a fact that I hope speaks to Krall’s literary merit. I read them in Swedish translation, and I have noticed that her publication in English differs a bit. The collection The Woman from Hamburg (2005) contains some stories from this volume from 1993 and the rest from Krall’s Dowody na istnienie (“Proof of existence”) from 1996.
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Kinship of all Species 