1/2/2024 0 Comments Mary ida fink![]() ![]() For her part though she has become resigned to survival, even at the cost of her marriage and so she sanctions this parlous and already tempestuous relationship. And he does, albeit reluctantly, for his wife is after all just upstairs. On the pretext that Clara's "Jewish appearance" would be a liability if she were to be anywhere but up in the loft, and that Artur could pass as a local (a visiting brother?) she encourages him to do the necessary work around the farm and thus be in a position to spend more time with her. His wife upstairs though is an inconvenience. Emilia has long held a torch for Artur (she confesses to him that she had once visited his surgery for an examination while not actually being ill), and his presence here could be a mutually beneficial one, despite the danger in which it places her. Rural Emilia is forlornly awaiting her husband's return from the front and she takes the family in, giving them shelter in her loft. Based on the life of composer Ida Fink, it paints a very bleak picture indeed, and a very complex one, emotionally. Another movie told in flash-back, this follows the plight of Jewish surgeon Artur Planck, his wife Clara and their family as they seek to escape persecution in occupied Poland. She in turn seeks out a country farmhouse and its owner, but is left in no doubt that she is not welcome there. Renowned composer and musician returns to Poland with her daughter for the opening of a concert hall dedicated in her honour. The actors do a great job of selling the story, and the script does a great job of showing a human dilemma of conflicting priorities with life and death at stake. But if you accept that the emphasis lies where it does, then you'll certainly be glad that for once Uri Barbash directed a script by an independently successful playwright rather than by his brother Benny (no offense intended). It could be that audiences were surprised by the relative weight of the indoor part of the story, where everything depends on the interaction of the actors and their movement in a space no bigger than a stage and by the relative weight of the interplay between the characters living in fear of the Nazis, as opposed to actual encounters with the Nazis themselves. And the screenwriter, Motti Lerner, does in fact write mostly for the stage. Because so much of the film occurs in the small space of a peasant's hut, you could mistake it for a stage play with a few cinematic scenes tacked on. Lastly, by examining the role that silence plays in Holocaust short stories, I will shed light on how this literary genre uniquely reveals the assault on the soul, on language, and on human relationship that came about in Europe from 1933 to 1945.The filmmakers went to the trouble of shooting much of this movie in Poland, and maybe they benefited from something invisible in the atmosphere but there is rather little happening outdoors in the movie and I couldn't have told whether it was shot in Poland or in Poughkeepsie. For language is central to human relationship, and human relationship-at least among the Jews-was targeted for obliteration during the Holocaust. Furthermore, I examine how this motif of silence, woven throughout Fink’s narratives, highlights the themes of the collapse of time and the collapse of relationships, which I consider key themes found throughout the Holocaust short story genre. ![]() Through a close analytical examination of the literary motif of silence found in select Holocaust short stories written by Ida Fink, this paper explores the ways in which Fink’s narratives illuminate this assault on word and meaning, on language and silence. ![]() Such connections are particularly significant for a literary work, since the literary text consists of this whole dynamic. How can a short story shed light on what came under assault during the Holocaust and the Nazis’ systematic annihilation of the Jewish people? Like individual testimonies piecing together the horror and enormity of a crime, Holocaust short stories can convey a defining aspect of the Nazis’ assault on the soul, particularly as that assault manifests itself in an assault on language and meaning-and, by implication, on silence. ![]()
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