The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo in the hands of one of our greatest novelists.
First glimpsed riding on the back of a boys motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead.
How did thisthe fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholichappen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawas story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles, Jewish and Catholic, who perished during the German occupation. Also evoking, among others, the writer Tadeusz Borowskis ill-fated life and Janusz Korczaks valorous attempts to save orphaned children, Czeslawa becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.
Genre: Literary Fiction
First glimpsed riding on the back of a boys motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead.
How did thisthe fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholichappen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawas story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles, Jewish and Catholic, who perished during the German occupation. Also evoking, among others, the writer Tadeusz Borowskis ill-fated life and Janusz Korczaks valorous attempts to save orphaned children, Czeslawa becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.
Genre: Literary Fiction