8 Life Lessons from Ida Fink

ida_fink_gettyimages_94.jpg, default, Ida Fink, Paris, photo: Ulf Andersen / Getty Images

2021 marked the centennial of the birth and tenth anniversary of the death of one of Israel’s most important writers, a native of Poland. Her modest literary oeuvre constitutes an outstanding testimony to the Holocaust. What does her writing teach us?

Memories

Ida Fink presented her inimitable, lyrically discreet style to her readers relatively late in her career. Though in Israel she dealt with documenting the testimony of Holocaust survivors over many years, she only began to relate her own experiences in the 1970s. While it’s true that she had reached for her pen even before the war, she viewed her youthful attempts at poetry as literarily weak. Similarly in Switzerland in 1948, her story Threshold – featuring her sister Hela (Elza, actually Elżbieta) – appeared in the French-language press. But it was only in her short-story collections A Fragment of Time and Traces and in her tale A Journey that she made herself known as a mature author.

In the time between the war and the appearance of her debut book her memories or emotions did not fade away. That time gave the author the distance she needed to process her trauma into literary terms. Memory in the works of Ida Fink is always fresh, though stripped of unnecessary details, superfluous reflections and personal accountings. It preserved, however, what was most important: her values and a warning about what the future might bring. Her protagonists have names and, even if they are fictional characters, their literary lives are rooted in the real lives of the Jews. In recreating them, Fink recalled the anonymous victims and the common history that shapes our identity.

‘A Fragment of Time’

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Warsaw Ghetto: Smocza Street, section from Pawia to the north, photo: Ludwig Bundesarchiv German Federal Archives

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It’s easiest to say that there is no time in Ida Fink’s work. ‘I want to tell about a fragment of time that isn’t measured in months’ – with those words she opens her story A Fragment of Time. It is not a physical quantity nor is it events playing out chronologically. Nor is it an objective measure. It would be a misunderstanding to call it unitary or fluent. That time was old. Ida Fink’s time is new. Something that tears itself away. It slows down and it speeds up. It’s subjective. It’s measured in words. Which? ‘Action’, the writer responds. ‘The space between the first action and the second was considerable’, she clarifies in her A Second Fragment of Time and adds ‘it was a borderland’.

Fink rejects the traditional criteria for measuring time by using a non-continuous narrative, pauses, shifting events (the current ones are interwoven with her memories), simultaneity. Her individual sense of time morphs into a group experience. We all have in common the dramatic wait between one act of violence and the next, the moments spent in a jail cell or in hiding. As Barbara Engelking points out in Time Has Ceased to Exist For Me… An Analysis of the Experience of Time in Extreme Situations: ‘Social time – as opposed to astronomical time – is non-continuous, changing, unsteady and subject to different valuations’. This crystalises during interactions between the characters. It is an unknown quantity that leaves its mark on the characters – even a physical mark in some cases as is the case with the lead character in the story Skok where she suffers a blemish which deforms her face.

Silences

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Still from 'Spring 1941' (based on short stories by Ida Fink), director: Uri Barbash, 2008, photo: Opus Film / Praxis Films

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A certain poet once told me that this isn’t how you should write about the occupation. He said that I open the window and leave it open just a crack through which I look out on the world. And then I tell everyone about what I see in a small voice, a whisper. Instead, you should be throwing the window wide open and screaming!’

Writer Justyna Sobolewska said this in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza. Ida Fink couldn’t have written any differently and maybe that’s why her testimony is so suggestive and multidimensional. Silence builds suspense, exposes fear, provokes empathy, and hides insecurity. It can be found in understatements, the awkward embarrassment of the characters and their knowing looks, in a calm phrase or in discreet descriptions of events.

The narrator of The Outflowing Garden instructs us as follows:

You should first carefully-delicately pick each apple off the branch and then carefully-delicately wrap them in a paper cloak so that they shouldn’t freeze in the winter and then carefully-delicately lay them in a wicker basket…

Fink treats words with the same delicacy and care. She’s careful that they shouldn’t wound, that they not be too lugubrious, but, at the same time, that they speak to the reader. The superficial dispassion of this autobiographical literature evokes humility in the reader. Fink sometimes compares her stories’ narrator to a Greek chorus – he or she comments on events that are taking place offstage while never losing their strength of expression. It’s a whisper that cannot be silenced.

Music

Music presents a counterpoint to silence in Fink’s stories:

He uncovered the keyboard and, without a moment’s thought or the sort of concentration as would usually precede playing, in a kind of nervous haste, he played two short passages in C minor. They sound like shouts! (…) There was nothing dry in that play, nothing artificial – it was pure music, reaching to the bottom of one’s heart.
^{A passage from ‘Zygmunt’}

Before the war, Ida Fink was a student of the Lviv Musical Conservatory majoring in piano and the sounds of that instrument often feature in her work. Usually, they are calming, they evoke memories of a happy childhood, they create a safe haven far away from the realities of the war. Another time, their sounds are drowned out by ‘the clatter of tanks, the crunch of the tank treads’, which interrupt not only the music, but also life itself: a talented composer or a lover of Bach perishes.

Noise can also be heard in A Journey, when the lead character - who has been concealing both her educational background and her ethnic background – suddenly rebels against the German’s disdain and plays a Chopin polonaise:

She stopped after eight bars. Her hands were trembling; she had to hide them in the pockets of her apron. There was silence in the room.

Music is an accumulator of emotion. The need to vent those emotions is stronger than the risk of their exposure. When playing, the woman doesn’t pretend to be anyone else. A few chords momentarily bring back the former order and offer a feeling of freedom.

Mindfulness

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Still from 'The Last Hide' (based on the novel 'The Journey' by Ida Fink), directed by Pierre Koralnik, 2002, photo: © WDR / Arte

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Ida Fink’s discretion is evident not only in her style of storytelling in a muted voice, but also in her way of observing the cruelty of war. Despite the presence of autobiographical elements in her work, the author creates the impression of a dispassionate narrator; she adopts the role of a discerning observer. It’s not about voyeurism, but rather about stolen glimpses full of tact. Her well-honed sense of observation allowed her to pick out key moments or to find the words to get them across to her readers in a simple manner.

Fink’s works don’t focus on the brutal details. Her material comprises memorable details, barely noticed gestures, bits of images. Their description stems from a wonder far from any naiveté or accusation. This attempt to observe as if from without serves to objectivise experience – individual experiences become common to many people.

Loves

‘We can’t do anything; we can’t even love or make ourselves happy’ – complains the lead character in the story Behind the Hedge. Moreover, the narrator of the work Zygmunt admits: ‘Who in those days had the patience for friendly conversations, for taking an interest in the fate of others? We were egotists!’. Those are only two samples of her prose which, through contradiction, points to what is most important. For Fink, love expresses itself above all through responsibility for another human being, rejecting apathy to their fate. It is that other human being – whether a friend or a stranger – who should be in the centre of our attention. At the same time, the stories told by the author more often show alienation, and value human life because of its origins.

The main characters of Holocaust literature undergo a test of humanity – the price of failure is one’s life or the life of someone else. The world of Ida Fink’s tales is not black and white. Each decision carries with it a risk: those who help rarely do so without some angle or other. The author poses questions of a moral nature about dignity and decency in times of war. She doesn’t offer simple answers – she just points out the consequences of decisions made.

Identities

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Fragment of Zbaraż, where Ida Fink was born, 1919–1939, photo: NAC / https://audiovis.nac.gov.pl

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She was born Ida Landau; in 1948, she married Bruno Fink. To her sister, she remained Marysia. That was the name in her ‘Aryan’ papers; it’s a memento of her escape from the ghetto to Germany – it brought her good luck. She described that journey in one of her stories which she called autobiographical fiction. Her lead characters – the second was two years younger than the author’s sister, using the name Helena in her false papers – were forced to hide their true identities in order to survive the war.

The question of changing personalities also shows up in Fink’s stories. In one case, it’s a deliberate dodge, in another, it’s not entirely conscious as in Happy Zosia:

Because there are women who, after what they’d been through, were left in various sad moods. But she’s not. It’s strange. The reluctance to speak, yet the desire to laugh. She heard what her doctor said – that these are sym-p-toms.

The woman who hid during the war in a barn took on a new identity: ‘I don’t know what there was before and what I was like. So it’s as if I didn’t exist’. In that story, the author writes about a trauma which leaves an irreversible mark on the psyche of people who survived the Holocaust.

A person’s identity naturally comes out in their language, but Ida Fink had another view on the matter. She spoke Hebrew on a daily basis, but she had ‘an appropriate imagination’ about it. It seems that she tried writing in that language and she even published a few children’s story books in that language in Tel Aviv, but later on she wrote exclusively in Polish. When she lived in Israel and went to a Polish café, she became convinced that she was a ‘100% Israeli’. Israel was her homeland. She didn’t see any contradiction in that. Fink’s position proved that identity is shaped not only by relations with others or a feeling of belonging, but rather by separation and individual choices.

Daily events

If Holocaust literature makes one think of cruelty and death, then Ida Fink’s are an exception. Of course, the writer doesn’t obscure the past, but she presents things from a different, less obvious angle. After reading her works, there remains an impression of warmth, clarity (no doubt, because of her harmonious use of phrases) and intimacy. Focusing on little things, objects around which the entire story is constructed (consider Playing with a Key), creates an illusion of normality which is only valued when insecurity creeps into daily life.

This can be seen perfectly in her descriptions of nature, which was a refuge, practically the only uneffaced trace of a former, pre-war life. This immutable background is painted with the aid of velvet words whose delicacy contrasted with the noises of the war, the fear and the approaching catastrophe:

The death of the Tsarina would have remained just one of a million anonymous deaths were it not for the fact that it happened on a beautiful and mild day […], just before twilight when the trees cast long shadows and the air is saturated with a light, bluish fog, thickening and darkening from moment to moment, though it was still a long way to night.

^{A passage from ‘Death of the Tsarina’}

A few characters manage to return to the former world, but changed. The author has given them a challenge which she herself had faced: tales of the fate of the Jews, leaving a trace. For Ida Fink, quiet does not at all mean silence.

^{Originally written in Polish, translated by Yale Reisner, Oct 2021}

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