Ida Fink Quotes (1921-2011)

“Ida Fink's work seems to me one of the best answers offered to the question of how the artist can confront the Holocaust. The delicate motions of consciousness are traced, in all their glorious subtlety, while the unspeakable forces of massed brutality come bearing down. Only a writer of the first rank could bring this off, and the world is lucky to have her.”

“Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past...In all of Fink’s work, the seemingly insignificant detail opens up a profound look at complexities of experience, memory, and motivation. As Fink excavates what she terms “the ruins of memory,” she brings to the forefront the act of memory itself, and the complicated relationship linking memory, imagination, and language. Fragments of the past that resurface in the present, Fink’s writing offers an unflinching and insightful look at wartime experiences and post-war memories. By turns poignant and tender, grim and sardonic, Fink’s lean and unsentimental prose conveys the profound and lasting effects of the Holocaust.”

“Ida Fink's haunting stories-brief and unforgettable-lead us gently into the harrowing ordinariness of wartime Jewish Poland. Through the disturbing, painterly quiet of her art we see them live again, all those doomed, preoccupied, idiosyncratic friends, families, and lovers. Traces confirms it: Ida Fink is the Chekhov of the martyred.”

“I can think of no other writer on this subject who has domesticated it in quite the way Ida Fink has, conveying the banality of evil through ordinary details the smell of kasha cooking on a stove, mosquitoes buzzing, sunlight playing on water-and then suddenly, quietly, suffusing that banality with the taste of blood.”

“Ida Fink...was a master at infusing moments and gestures with the looming violence and death of the Holocaust...Fink worked on a small canvas but managed within the confines of few words to remind us how quickly life can forever move into the abyss.”