Review: Less than spellbinding...
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 07 11, 2013
I would dearly love to know what prize this story won, since it merits none.The Holocaust is a huge, huge subject. As both a Jew, and someone who grew up around a lot of concentration camp survivors, the idea of flashbacks is entirely plausible to me. As is the concept of returning to a Bergen Belsen or Auschwitz or other camp to somehow get closure, make whatever peace you can, or rail against the universe.But you can't take every plausible concept, throw them all into a short story, and hope they live.This story is about a woman, diagnosed with cancer (concept!), who has only months to live. She wants to revisit the camp where she was lucky enough not to be shot (the gun jammed), not to be abused (subtext, anyhow), not to be killed (almost but not quite), and lucky enough to escape. Her children object - she's too ill, she should spend the time with them, their father is already gone, now they're about to lose her too - eh, voila! here's the current conflict!! They agree that she can go (really? how kind...) in the end, and she finds herself on a plane having flashbacks. Voila! depth and psychological conflict!!Why on earth didn't the author just start with her on the plane? were the children supposed to show us there is Life After Holocaust? didn't work.The whole thing is like that - it reads as though the author pulled out a Cliff Notes on How To Write A Short Story, then set about jamming as much into 3,500 words as humanly possible.Unfortunately, the author forgot to add feeling.We don't care about this woman at the end. We get no sense of her shame, or feeling trapped, or survivor's guilt. In fact, we get no sense of her inner world or feelings at all, beyond the hackneyed -- she sees a Gestapo figure in grey, but oh, that's just a caretaker for what is now a museum site. She sees a cadaverous figure in prisoner's clothes, but oh, that's just a very skinny guy helping with her baggage.Annoying. Doubly annoying, because I really wanted to like it, to be moved by it, to find something in it that made my heart swell.