Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels
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Description
A "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize show more the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption. As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, "Fugitive Pieces" is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to. "From the Trade Paperback edition."" show lessTags
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Florian_Brennstoff Die ganze Tragik und Trostlosigkeit des zweiten Weltkrieges und des Verfolgtseins, ihre sprachliche Wucht, das verbindet die beiden Bücher.
Member Reviews
“There’s a moment when love makes us believe in death for the first time.”
I read and noted the presumed truth of that line: the fear of losing those we love. Now I feel and live it. When a friend recently consoled me with the idea that grief is love with nowhere to go, I knew exactly what she meant.
This is a beautiful and profound novel that I ended up finishing at a painfully and unexpectedly (in)appropriate time.
It’s about making a life after sudden death (“no one is born just once”), nurturing memories, and living with ghosts (not literally). It’s about the importance of stories: of piecing them together from fragments, whether the sort of snippets refugees abandon or treasure, or natural artefacts that the brave, show more wise, big-hearted geologist, Athos, studies.
Image: Heart-shaped hole in pebbles (Source.)
One Story, Two Narrators
The first 200 exquisite pages are fictional poet Jakob Beer’s unfinished memoirs, “a biography of longing”. All his writings were, in some sense, ghost stories, or about hiding. But this charts his being the sole survivor of a Nazi raid on his home, aged seven, then to Zakynthos, Toronto, and back to Zakynthos. It’s profound, painful, poetic, and hopeful. It drips with symbolism and recurring tropes. It was 5* at least.
Then, for the final 100 pages, it suddenly switches to Ben, the son of refugees, who “was born into absence… A hiding place, rotted out by grief” to a father “who erased himself as much as possible within the legal bounds of citizenship”. Ben was a student admirer of Jakob, who meets elderly Jakob once, at a party. When Jakob dies, Ben tries to assemble the pieces of his life story, travelling to Jakob's home on Zakynthos, living some parallels of his Jakob's life. The trouble is, Ben’s voice is barely distinguishable from Jakob’s (even the chapter titles are taken from those in the main part). The only difference is that there are hardly any of the poetic aphorisms that make most of the book sublime. A hugely disappointing way to finish.
Living after Loss
“There is no absence if there remains even the memory of absence.”
Jakob lost his parents and older sister in terrifying circumstances. Piano-playing Bella is the strongest memory and hence greatest loss throughout his life.
"She whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.”
He nurtures and cherishes his memories, the times he almost glimpses her, but gradually he learns the best remembrance is to embrace the life he’s privileged to have. Not to forget, but to focus more on the future than the past.
“To remain with the dead is to abandon them."
Quotes about Loss
• “To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?”
• “The intimacy that death forces on us.” Going through letters and possessions.
• “A house, more than a diary, is the intimate glimpse. A house is a life interrupted.”
• “Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from his own death. But it must not steal from him his life.”
• “I tried to embroider darkness… Black on black, until the only way to see the texture would be to move the whole cloth under the light.”
Other Quotes
• “Limestone - that crushed reef of memory” and cave formations “spasms in time”.
• “Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.”
• “Starlight [is] only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves.”
• “I long to steal your memories... to syphon off your dreams [nightmares].”
• Writing about childhood memories “in a language foreign to their happening… English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.” Translation as a form of transubstantiation.
• “The best teacher lodges an interest not in the mind, but in the heart.”
• “One could look deeply for meaning or one can invent it.”
• “History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers… History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.”
• “The leaves whisper under the street lamps… Flowers dripping from window boxes.”
• “The visitation of moonlight. It occupies the darkness, erasing everything it touches.”
• “The ship’s flag grabs at twilight. Heat washes away under the rushing fountain of stars.”
“Write to save yourself… and someday you’ll write because you’ve been saved.”
Hence this review. I hope. I do. And this book is part of that process. show less
I read and noted the presumed truth of that line: the fear of losing those we love. Now I feel and live it. When a friend recently consoled me with the idea that grief is love with nowhere to go, I knew exactly what she meant.
This is a beautiful and profound novel that I ended up finishing at a painfully and unexpectedly (in)appropriate time.
It’s about making a life after sudden death (“no one is born just once”), nurturing memories, and living with ghosts (not literally). It’s about the importance of stories: of piecing them together from fragments, whether the sort of snippets refugees abandon or treasure, or natural artefacts that the brave, show more wise, big-hearted geologist, Athos, studies.
Image: Heart-shaped hole in pebbles (Source.)
One Story, Two Narrators
The first 200 exquisite pages are fictional poet Jakob Beer’s unfinished memoirs, “a biography of longing”. All his writings were, in some sense, ghost stories, or about hiding. But this charts his being the sole survivor of a Nazi raid on his home, aged seven, then to Zakynthos, Toronto, and back to Zakynthos. It’s profound, painful, poetic, and hopeful. It drips with symbolism and recurring tropes. It was 5* at least.
Then, for the final 100 pages, it suddenly switches to Ben, the son of refugees, who “was born into absence… A hiding place, rotted out by grief” to a father “who erased himself as much as possible within the legal bounds of citizenship”. Ben was a student admirer of Jakob, who meets elderly Jakob once, at a party. When Jakob dies, Ben tries to assemble the pieces of his life story, travelling to Jakob's home on Zakynthos, living some parallels of his Jakob's life. The trouble is, Ben’s voice is barely distinguishable from Jakob’s (even the chapter titles are taken from those in the main part). The only difference is that there are hardly any of the poetic aphorisms that make most of the book sublime. A hugely disappointing way to finish.
Living after Loss
“There is no absence if there remains even the memory of absence.”
Jakob lost his parents and older sister in terrifying circumstances. Piano-playing Bella is the strongest memory and hence greatest loss throughout his life.
"She whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.”
He nurtures and cherishes his memories, the times he almost glimpses her, but gradually he learns the best remembrance is to embrace the life he’s privileged to have. Not to forget, but to focus more on the future than the past.
“To remain with the dead is to abandon them."
Quotes about Loss
• “To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?”
• “The intimacy that death forces on us.” Going through letters and possessions.
• “A house, more than a diary, is the intimate glimpse. A house is a life interrupted.”
• “Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from his own death. But it must not steal from him his life.”
• “I tried to embroider darkness… Black on black, until the only way to see the texture would be to move the whole cloth under the light.”
Other Quotes
• “Limestone - that crushed reef of memory” and cave formations “spasms in time”.
• “Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.”
• “Starlight [is] only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves.”
• “I long to steal your memories... to syphon off your dreams [nightmares].”
• Writing about childhood memories “in a language foreign to their happening… English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.” Translation as a form of transubstantiation.
• “The best teacher lodges an interest not in the mind, but in the heart.”
• “One could look deeply for meaning or one can invent it.”
• “History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers… History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.”
• “The leaves whisper under the street lamps… Flowers dripping from window boxes.”
• “The visitation of moonlight. It occupies the darkness, erasing everything it touches.”
• “The ship’s flag grabs at twilight. Heat washes away under the rushing fountain of stars.”
“Write to save yourself… and someday you’ll write because you’ve been saved.”
Hence this review. I hope. I do. And this book is part of that process. show less
The first part of this was incredible, the final third jolted me out of the lyrical place I found myself and it just didn't, for me, work as a whole.
Jakob Beer is a Jewish, Polish boy who is found hiding in an iron age bog site by a Greek Archaeologist (and all round polymath) called Athos. Athos saves Jakob and takes him home to Zakythos. Here Jakob learns about history, geography, language and scholarly pursuits. But he also learns about love and loss and how to continue with life when all he knew has been stripped away. he struggles to deal with the loss (presumed death) of his sister, Bella, and she haunts the book.
The first 2/3rds are narrated by Jakob, and we hear about life in Greece under the Nazis, the hardships but also the show more friendship, loyalty and solidarity that hold the community together. After the war, life moves to Toronto, and Jakob has a new place to refind his feet. He meets his best friend and, in a mirror to Athos and his best friend, Maurice and his wife play a life in Jakob life and after his death.
The final third of the book is written by Ben, a person also scarred by the holocaust, but as the child of survivors. It is a different dynamic, with a different voice and it jolted me badly. Ben is tasked with finding Jakob's journals by Maurice, he's going through a bad patch in his marriage and through exploring Jakob's house and writings he finds something out about himself. It felt contrived, especially in contrast to the first 2/3rds. Maybe I didn't warm to Ben. To me he felt self centred and as if he was making a mountain out of amole hill. He was jealous of his wife's relationship with his parents, parents that it felt like he never really understood himself.
This was excellently written, the language lyrical, the thoughts expressed profound. If this had ended at 2/3rds distance, I'd have been giving this 4 stars, if not more, but the final third felt like it didn't fit. Jakob has his afterlife in his writing, I felt he didn't need Ben poking around in it. show less
Jakob Beer is a Jewish, Polish boy who is found hiding in an iron age bog site by a Greek Archaeologist (and all round polymath) called Athos. Athos saves Jakob and takes him home to Zakythos. Here Jakob learns about history, geography, language and scholarly pursuits. But he also learns about love and loss and how to continue with life when all he knew has been stripped away. he struggles to deal with the loss (presumed death) of his sister, Bella, and she haunts the book.
The first 2/3rds are narrated by Jakob, and we hear about life in Greece under the Nazis, the hardships but also the show more friendship, loyalty and solidarity that hold the community together. After the war, life moves to Toronto, and Jakob has a new place to refind his feet. He meets his best friend and, in a mirror to Athos and his best friend, Maurice and his wife play a life in Jakob life and after his death.
The final third of the book is written by Ben, a person also scarred by the holocaust, but as the child of survivors. It is a different dynamic, with a different voice and it jolted me badly. Ben is tasked with finding Jakob's journals by Maurice, he's going through a bad patch in his marriage and through exploring Jakob's house and writings he finds something out about himself. It felt contrived, especially in contrast to the first 2/3rds. Maybe I didn't warm to Ben. To me he felt self centred and as if he was making a mountain out of amole hill. He was jealous of his wife's relationship with his parents, parents that it felt like he never really understood himself.
This was excellently written, the language lyrical, the thoughts expressed profound. If this had ended at 2/3rds distance, I'd have been giving this 4 stars, if not more, but the final third felt like it didn't fit. Jakob has his afterlife in his writing, I felt he didn't need Ben poking around in it. show less
"The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts. Noises never heard before, torn from my father’s mouth. Then silence. My mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of buttons, little white teeth.”
Jakob Beer is seven when soldiers break into his home, killing his family while he hides behind a wall. Disoriented and afraid, he travels the forests of Poland at night until he comes upon Athos Ruossos at Biskupin, an archaeological site. Athos takes the boy in and brings him to the Greek island of Zakynthos where they endure the war together. Soon after, Athos decides the best thing for Jakob show more is to emigrate, to Canada specifically. There Jakob grows up, following in Athos' footsteps and falls in love with a woman quite unlike himself. But in the back of his mind he knows he still has to confront the traumatic memories of his past, lest they consume him.
Anne Michaels is primarily known as a poet and this is reflected in the book. Her diction and sentence structure flow like water and there are some choice quotes that will give you pause. It was a pleasure to devour her words as they created wonderfully vivid imagery, evoking joy and sadness. Some of her paragraphs contain an element of violence and gore but are written so beautifully that you can't help but admire them.
"When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them though their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death – into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife’s expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical formulas, dreams. As they felt another man’s and another’s blood-soaked hair though their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands."
While I appreciated Michaels' mastery of words, I felt somewhat lost in the story. The plot feels subservient to the diction and I think this is where Michaels' expertise as a poet does her a disservice. I never felt grounded as the story had a fragmented quality to it and at times I wasn't sure what was happening, a dealbreaker in my mind.
There's also a second narrative introduced quite late in the book, in a voice other than Jakob's. I didn't want to abandon him and pick up with another character only 100 pages from the end of the story. It was unnecessary, distracting and this second voice was too similar to Jakob's to have any impact on the reader in terms of seeing the book from a different perspective.
In the end, this book is about memory and loss and how we have to learn to let people go, how we can never go home again but learn to make a home for ourselves, to make other people our home. show less
Jakob Beer is seven when soldiers break into his home, killing his family while he hides behind a wall. Disoriented and afraid, he travels the forests of Poland at night until he comes upon Athos Ruossos at Biskupin, an archaeological site. Athos takes the boy in and brings him to the Greek island of Zakynthos where they endure the war together. Soon after, Athos decides the best thing for Jakob show more is to emigrate, to Canada specifically. There Jakob grows up, following in Athos' footsteps and falls in love with a woman quite unlike himself. But in the back of his mind he knows he still has to confront the traumatic memories of his past, lest they consume him.
Anne Michaels is primarily known as a poet and this is reflected in the book. Her diction and sentence structure flow like water and there are some choice quotes that will give you pause. It was a pleasure to devour her words as they created wonderfully vivid imagery, evoking joy and sadness. Some of her paragraphs contain an element of violence and gore but are written so beautifully that you can't help but admire them.
"When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them though their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death – into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife’s expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical formulas, dreams. As they felt another man’s and another’s blood-soaked hair though their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands."
While I appreciated Michaels' mastery of words, I felt somewhat lost in the story. The plot feels subservient to the diction and I think this is where Michaels' expertise as a poet does her a disservice. I never felt grounded as the story had a fragmented quality to it and at times I wasn't sure what was happening, a dealbreaker in my mind.
There's also a second narrative introduced quite late in the book, in a voice other than Jakob's. I didn't want to abandon him and pick up with another character only 100 pages from the end of the story. It was unnecessary, distracting and this second voice was too similar to Jakob's to have any impact on the reader in terms of seeing the book from a different perspective.
In the end, this book is about memory and loss and how we have to learn to let people go, how we can never go home again but learn to make a home for ourselves, to make other people our home. show less
It's over between us, Anne Michaels. It's not you, it's me. But our relationship is ended. I struggled through 9 pages of this and concluded that it is not written for an 'ordinary' person such as me. I understood almost none of those 9 pages. Paragraphs seemed to have no connection to each other. And each paragraph was obscure from the very first:
"Time is a blind guide"
WTF! And further down that first page:
"I squirmed from the marshy ground like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, like the boy they uprooted in the middle of Franz Josef Street while they were repairing the road, six hundred cockleshell beads around his neck, a helmet of mud. Dripping with the prune-coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Afterbirth of the earth."
Who the show more hell is "Tollund Man"? or "Grauballe Man"? I'm reasonably educated but I've never heard of these men. Should I stop reading and google them? What's the point of introducing them if the reader won't understand the reference? Just to show how clever you are? This is a book for the elitists, I reckon. People who like reading esoteric poetry and James Joyce. I am not one of those. This is my second Orange Prize winner I've 'read' in a row, and I've abandoned both. The Orange Prize is now a guide to my black list.
Nancy Pearl would not approve of me stopping reading this early, but I haven't got enough life left to waste it on this sort of stuff. show less
"Time is a blind guide"
WTF! And further down that first page:
"I squirmed from the marshy ground like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, like the boy they uprooted in the middle of Franz Josef Street while they were repairing the road, six hundred cockleshell beads around his neck, a helmet of mud. Dripping with the prune-coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Afterbirth of the earth."
Who the show more hell is "Tollund Man"? or "Grauballe Man"? I'm reasonably educated but I've never heard of these men. Should I stop reading and google them? What's the point of introducing them if the reader won't understand the reference? Just to show how clever you are? This is a book for the elitists, I reckon. People who like reading esoteric poetry and James Joyce. I am not one of those. This is my second Orange Prize winner I've 'read' in a row, and I've abandoned both. The Orange Prize is now a guide to my black list.
Nancy Pearl would not approve of me stopping reading this early, but I haven't got enough life left to waste it on this sort of stuff. show less
Fugitive Pieces is a tour de force that must be consumed slowly and savored, like a good wine or a piece of New York cheesecake. It is the story of Jakob Beer, a Jewish child saved from the holocaust by a Greek stranger. In a style that is beautiful and stark at the same moment, Michaels ferrys us through Jakob’s life as he deals with his loss and its impact on his future.
When Jakob’s story is complete, and you feel the book has reached its logical end, Michaels pulls a rabbit out of the hat and introduces some new magic in the guise of Ben, the child of holocaust survivors who is touched in a profound way by Jakob. Ben is proof that the influence of an individual can outlast his life, that a life can mean more than we know, that show more our own grief can assuage someone else’s.
The night you and I met, Jakob, I heard you tell my wife that there's a moment when love makes us believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief, you said, is the weight of a sleeping child.
For grief is so often memory, and memory is what extends us beyond the limits of our corporeal bodies. No one would protest the burden of carrying a sleeping child.
I marked numerous passages in my reading. I stopped and reread paragraphs because the beauty they expressed was too profound to be satisfied by only a single reading.
As for your brother's unhappiness, I'm naive enough to think that love is always good, no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances. I'm not old enough yet to imagine the instances where this isn't true and where regret outweighs everything.
and
She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you're silted up and can't move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you the most.
There are myriad holocaust stories, but the best are the ones that remind us of our humanity, what we share, and that, as Donne told us, “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."
This is an excellent holocaust tale. show less
When Jakob’s story is complete, and you feel the book has reached its logical end, Michaels pulls a rabbit out of the hat and introduces some new magic in the guise of Ben, the child of holocaust survivors who is touched in a profound way by Jakob. Ben is proof that the influence of an individual can outlast his life, that a life can mean more than we know, that show more our own grief can assuage someone else’s.
The night you and I met, Jakob, I heard you tell my wife that there's a moment when love makes us believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief, you said, is the weight of a sleeping child.
For grief is so often memory, and memory is what extends us beyond the limits of our corporeal bodies. No one would protest the burden of carrying a sleeping child.
I marked numerous passages in my reading. I stopped and reread paragraphs because the beauty they expressed was too profound to be satisfied by only a single reading.
As for your brother's unhappiness, I'm naive enough to think that love is always good, no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances. I'm not old enough yet to imagine the instances where this isn't true and where regret outweighs everything.
and
She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you're silted up and can't move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you the most.
There are myriad holocaust stories, but the best are the ones that remind us of our humanity, what we share, and that, as Donne told us, “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."
This is an excellent holocaust tale. show less
Ann Michaels' novel "Fugitive Pieces" is really just beautifully written -- she has a poet's ear for language, which really made this book enjoyable. As a bonus, she spends a bit of time of subjects that have thoroughly interested me -- Tolland man... the Scott expedition to the South Pole... these are little details that figure in the book and made it even better for me.
The story focuses on Jakob, a Jewish boy who grew up in Poland and was rescued from a dire fate in the Holocaust by a Greek archaeologist. The story is really about those left behind and how it's impossible to really escape the horrible losses past experiences inflicted.
My understanding is this was Michaels' debut novel. I would certainly read more by her considering show more this work was pretty stunning. show less
The story focuses on Jakob, a Jewish boy who grew up in Poland and was rescued from a dire fate in the Holocaust by a Greek archaeologist. The story is really about those left behind and how it's impossible to really escape the horrible losses past experiences inflicted.
My understanding is this was Michaels' debut novel. I would certainly read more by her considering show more this work was pretty stunning. show less
You pick up a book about the Holocaust or World War II and you expect it to be powerful, you expect it to be moving or touching or force you to envision all kinds of things that should never be forgotten for the sake of those who were lost. What you don't expect is the perfection of a recipe that blends what you already know with some things you weren't familiar with, then stirs that together with the emotion of getting away while others did not. This book doesn't throw the events at you, but it does not ignore them either. It is the story of one boy who survives the tragedy of losing his family and lives on an island in relative contentment while others hide away or are lost forever. But his isn't the only survivor's guilt readers show more encounter.
The writing is simply excellent; each character's emotion shared with perfect clarity, each phrase or paragraph making you reflect and live, both at the same time. The book comes in two parts and the transition between the two is sharp and stunning, without much explanation for a short time, which reflects the nature of the need to change from one first person narrator to the other. That splitting of story and narrator also points out to us how one life can touch another, how we each bring change to those we meet. These little details draw the reader deeply in to the story.
Anne Michaels is a poet and the words within these pages show that with brilliance. If you read one book about surviving World War II, let it be this one. The emotional and verbal beauty put in to the retelling of the events of the holocaust is a more than fitting tribute to those who were not "buried in ground that will remember" them. show less
The writing is simply excellent; each character's emotion shared with perfect clarity, each phrase or paragraph making you reflect and live, both at the same time. The book comes in two parts and the transition between the two is sharp and stunning, without much explanation for a short time, which reflects the nature of the need to change from one first person narrator to the other. That splitting of story and narrator also points out to us how one life can touch another, how we each bring change to those we meet. These little details draw the reader deeply in to the story.
Anne Michaels is a poet and the words within these pages show that with brilliance. If you read one book about surviving World War II, let it be this one. The emotional and verbal beauty put in to the retelling of the events of the holocaust is a more than fitting tribute to those who were not "buried in ground that will remember" them. show less
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ThingScore 75
Mit ihrem Debütroman "Fluchtstücke" ist ihr, abgesehen von kleinen Schwächen, der Balanceakt zwischen Nachfühlen und Einfühlen in das Schicksal der Opfer, geglückt.
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Author Information
14 Works 5,197 Members
Anne Michaels was born in 1958 in Toronto, Canada. Her poetry and fiction has earned her several awards. "The Weight of Oranges," a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas. Another collection of poetry, "Miner's Pond," won the Canadian Authors Association Award and was she shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and show more the Trillium Award. "Fugitive Pieces," her first work of fiction won her the Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award, the Trillium Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, The Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award and the Orange Prize. She was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She is also a recipient of the National Magazine Award, for poetry, gold medal. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Fugitive Pieces
- Original title
- Fugitive Pieces
- Original publication date
- 1996
- People/Characters
- Jakob Beer; Athos Roussos; Ben; Bella Beer; Alexandra; Michaela (show all 7); Naomi
- Important places
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Poland; Zakynthos, Greece; Biskupin, Poland; Weston, Ontario, Canada; Greece
- Important events
- World War II
- Related movies
- Fugitive Pieces (2007 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- For J
- First words
- During the Second World War, countless manuscripts -- diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts -- were lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden--buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under fl... (show all)oors--by those who did not live to retrieve them.
- Quotations
- A parable: A respected rabbi is asked to speak to the congregation of a neighboring village. The rabbi, rather famous for his practical wisdom, is approached for advice wherever he goes. Wishing to have a few hours to himself... (show all) on the train, he disguises himself in shabby clothes and, with his withered posture, passes for a peasant. The disguise is so effective that he evokes disapproving stares and whispered insults from the well-to-do passengers around him. When the rabbi arrives at his destination, he's met by the dignitaries of the community who greet him with warmth and respect, tactfully ignoring his appearance. Those who ridiculed him on the train realize his prominence and their error and immediately beg his forgiveness. The old man is silent. For months after, these Jews - who, after all, consider themselves good an pious men - implore the rabbi to absolve them. Finally, when almost a year has passed, they come to the old man on the Day of Awe when, it is written, each man must forgive his fellow. But the rabbi refuses to speak. Exasperated, they finally raise their voices: How can a holy man commit such a sin -- to withhold forgiveness on this day of days? The rabbi smiles seriously . "All this time you have been asking the wrong man. You must ask the man on the train to forgive you."
The night you and I met, Jakob, I heard you tell my wife that there's a moment when love makes us believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping... (show all) child. All grief, anyone's grief, you said, is the weight of a sleeping child.
She was stopping to say goodbye and was caught, in such pain, wanting to rise, wanting to stay.
My father said, 'That man is a Hebrew and he carries the pride of his people.' Later I learned that most of the men who worked at the docks in Salonika were Jews and that the yehudi mahallari, the Hebrew quarter, was built al... (show all)ong the harbour.
Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you could choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib... (show all) that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.”
I thought of Houdini, astonishing audiences by stuffing himself into boxes and trunks, then escaping, unaware that a few years later other Jews would be crawling into bins and boxes and cupboards, in order to escape.
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved true by repetition - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I see that I must give what I most need.
- Blurbers
- Kakutani, Michiko; Berger, John; Potok, Chaim; Garcia, Cristina
- Original language
- English
Classifications
- Genres
- General Fiction, Fiction and Literature, Historical Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PR9199.3 .M453 .F84 — Language and Literature English English Literature English literature: Provincial, local, etc.
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 3,260
- Popularity
- 5,222
- Reviews
- 79
- Rating
- (3.78)
- Languages
- 14 — Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 71
- ASINs
- 11