⋙ [PDF] JOURNEY Ida Fink 9780374701246 Books

JOURNEY Ida Fink 9780374701246 Books

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JOURNEY Ida Fink 9780374701246 Books

Ida Fink has written a memorable novel that appears to be autobiographical. She follows the wartime life of two sisters as they attempt to escape capture in wartime Germany. Her description of their encounters with ordinary German citizens as well as police and SS at times had me reaching for the next page to see if they made it. This book showed me another way that Jews survived WWII.


Tags : JOURNEY [Ida Fink] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. In the autumn of 1942, two young Polish women flee the ghetto and embark on a journey into the heart of enemy territory,Ida Fink,JOURNEY,Farrar, Straus and Giroux,0374701245,9780374701246,010102 FSG Paper,FICTION Historical General,Fiction,Fiction - Historical,Fiction Historical,Fiction-Historical,GENERAL,Historical - General,SLAVIC (LANGUAGE) CONTEMPORARY FICTION,ScholarlyUndergraduate

JOURNEY Ida Fink 9780374701246 Books Reviews

The Journey (copyright 1992) written by Ida Fink is a work of Holocaust literature about two Jewish sisters struggling to survive the persecution of the Jews in 1942 Poland. The novel, an auto-biographical fiction, was originally written in Yiddish and published in Poland, but was translated into English by Joanna Weschler and Francine Prose. Fink's ultimate purpose of writing the novel is to show the inhumanity of genocide. By using juxtaposition of the cruel, passive behaviors of the non-Jews and the delicate lives of the girls, she reminds the reader of the difficulty of being a Jew during the war. She uses the strong, underlying theme of survival to bring attention to the era, now known as the Holocaust, and show the immense effects it had on real human lives.

Fink, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, writes from experience of hiding her own Jewish identity through the war. She was born in 1921. After escaping Poland in 1942, she lived in disguise among Polish farm workers inside Germany. Now living in Israel, she is the author of 3 novels, including The Journey and two other short Holocaust fictions A Scrap in Time and Traces. Though her books are fictional, they contain many auto-biographical elements from her knowledge and experiences of the Holocaust.

The novel itself begins with Katarzyna and Elzbieta, sisters whose names change twice for identity protection reasons, as the central characters on a journey to survive the Holocaust. Undercover as Polish peasants, they make it into the labor-force of Germany attempting to hide their Jewish race through the war. Fink gives Katarzyna a unique narrating role to guide the reader through the story. By shifting between first and third person, Fink exaggerates the theme of self alienation in Katarzyna's life, focusing on the relationship between the person she is and the person she must become to survive. Katarzyna, a girl of intuition and strength, has an optimistic, superstitious side of her personality, providing a flickering hope of survival throughout the dark journey. She has an incredible instinct for acting in unexpected situations and a sense of chance that follows the girls throughout their risky quest.

In one section, the girls encounter two informers who blackmail them by taking their papers and refusing to return them without being paid. "Wouldn't it be better to deal with this like civilized human beings," one of the informers smarts off. Katarzyna, with her keen, on-the-spot instinct, replies, catching the man off guard, "What do you mean, `human'?" This supports the theme of non-Jews in charge using their power for their own benefit. Thus, this quotation parallels the theme of the novel in that the Jews are being treated as anything but humans. This incident reveals the horror of the Holocaust and other cases where those in power use their position to their own advantage selfishly.

Even though this story is set over half a century ago, you see that it's possible for the same thing to happen today, in any place where racial prejudice gains power. In a fair world these Jewish girls wouldn't have had to face the immense struggles of their story. Fink strongly stresses the humanity of the girls and their right to life just as any other person deserves to live, whether German, Pole, or American. I think that this novel is relevant to our power-hungry culture and great for illustrating the inhumanness that can be caused by obedience to a discriminating authority. I would suggest it for high school students as well as adults who are currently in the thick of making decisions concerning the keeping or giving up of their constitutional rights. It opened my eyes to see what might happen if our government gains enough control to powerfully, for its own benefit, suppress another race. It was also comparable to the other non-fiction Holocaust works I have read, probably due to Fink's knowledge and experience of the time period.
This was OK, very sparsely written, probably intentionally so, about two Jewish sisters trying to hide in Germany during World War II. There were too many characters, too many names that appeared for only a page or two. And what she says was the most harrowing experience of the whole journey, that "brought us to the edge of the abyss" is glossed over in a few paragraphs. It just wasn't detailed enough for me, in spite of the obvious richness of experience there must have been. It was as if the author was compelled to write this, but not too much, or it would be too painful. Like reading a journalist's account, not a novelist's. The author was perhaps too close to the material to do it justice. It was in the Hemmingway style, sparse and terse. Were it not for the journey related, the writing would not be good. A much better book to read on this subject, and an autobiography, is "100 Cigarettes and a bottle of vodka" by Arthur Schaller.
Reading Simon Weisenthal's obituary just before Fink's presumably autobiographically based novel, I was struck in both cases (as in Art Speigelman's Maus) how the protagonists had evaded certain doom over and over again, seemingly by chance. When the narrator, whose name changes so often that, by the end of the book, you like her may have forgotten her original identity, mulls over how her prayer was only "please not yet" in crisis and nothing more, you realize how much of a role fate had in who survived and who did not.

The relentlessness of the extermination, here not in the camps but in everyday life for those who manage to disguise, if for a time, their Jewishness, reveals itself in the constant danger of exposure, not only by the Germans but by the Poles who might stumble upon the truth about the narrator and her accomplices from back home. Even as they escape the ghetto for Germany as slave laborers, they cannot fully trust their own fellow nationals. Accents, mundane details, imagined native cities and schools, catechisms, hymns and Christmas celebrations, relatives of potential informers who knew them in their homeland all of these factors never ease but briefly, no matter how far they seem from their origins, posing as one invented character after another.

This strain of brazenly acting--even before the Gestapo--so often as to (nearly?) obliterate one's true self makes the tension of this novel interiorized as well as represented in the often sparely but grippingly related events. I had heard an excerpt from this novel read on NPR, knowing nothing of the author, back on publication in 1992, and have never forgotten it. A small shortcoming is the telescoping of events at the close, and an afterward that seems too awkwardly expressed. But the force of this clearly told, unsentimentalized, and very immediate novel makes for a fresh take on events from a less memorialized perspective of those who went underground within the Reich to survive. Ida Fink has written two other collections of sketches and stories based on real events, and deserves your attention for her careful craft.
Excellent history and personal account of a WWII experience. Great to have in a personal library!
Ida Fink has written a memorable novel that appears to be autobiographical. She follows the wartime life of two sisters as they attempt to escape capture in wartime Germany. Her description of their encounters with ordinary German citizens as well as police and SS at times had me reaching for the next page to see if they made it. This book showed me another way that Jews survived WWII.