ABSTRACT
Fink’s story offers a fruitful starting point to explore the role of what the author term “peripheral vision” in the study of the Holocaust. Like many of Fink’s stories, “A Scrap of Time” builds on peripheral vision in its most literal sense. But by peripheral vision, the author intends something additional, something beyond the position of the observer, the witness who survives. He means the vision of the imaginative writer who, like Fink, uses indirection and language to help us understand things that are often referred to as “unspeakable”—things so fearsome and searing that they deflect our direct gaze. Fink was an eighteen-year-old student and an aspiring pianist when the Nazi invasion of Poland jolted her life from its moorings. Like the narrator of Ida Fink’s story, Sutzkever insists on a solidarity, a brotherhood with the “we” at the pit; like Fink’s narrator, only because he was not part of the “we” did he live to write about it.
