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PARTISAN REVIEW
by the distinguished Polish writer Julian Strykowski, who delighted in the
author's attempt to see his hometown through a camera lens and the
novel's distinctive "lack of plot, lack of dialogue , and lack of psycholo–
gism."
Annihilation
captures one day in the life of picturesque Zamosc, a
Polish-Jewish (as the dust-jacket describes it) town, in an anxious attempt,
eerily reminiscent of ghetto and death camp chronicles, " ... to see. To
be. To remember. To record scrupulously. One more photograph. And
then another. To follow what disappears. Not to miss anything." Yet the
narrator admits the futility of his efforts, knowing the ephemera of this
time and place "will vanish in the turmoil." Time in Zamosc seems to be
standing still. "Nothing happens," the narrator declares, quick to add,
"Nothing can be stopped."
Zamosc's citizens haven't a clue about the impending catastrophe al–
luded to in the book's Polish title ( which translates as "Holocaust"),
much like their counterparts in the novels set in pre-war by Israeli novel–
ist Aharon Appelfeld. Yet the reader and Szewc are all too aware of what
lurks ahead for the mysterious Chasidim as they eerily vanish into an
"empty" Jewish cemetery, shrouded in mist. Swecz does everything in his
narrative powers to counteract the workings of time, to bring his beloved
imagined town back to life, lavishing attention on sensory minutiae and
evanescent happenings soon to vanish. Zamosc's dreamlike beauty is al–
ready mixed with ribbons of smoke rising from chimneys, trains rolling
by the edge of town, dust and clouds - alarm signals readers of Holocaust
or annihilation literature will recognize. If Swecz's evocative
"photographs" had been real, they doubtless would have been burned,
scattered, lost, or would lie buried omewhere, perhaps awaiting discov–
ery. But who would there be left to identify - or identify with - the faces
and lives he has tried so valiantly to capture and save?
The action, or pronounced lack of it, in the two novellas ofBohumil
Hrabal's
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still,
takes place in a sleepy
Czech village just before and shortly after World War
II,
encompassing
but only obliquely alluding to the horrors suffered under the rule of the
Gestapo, and later, of Communism. Hrabal (b. 1914), who began to de–
vote himself fully to his writing only in 1962, has an exotic resume even
by Eastern European standards. He completed his studies at Prague's
Charles University with a doctorate in law, but found it impossible to
practice under the German occupation after 1939. (One Czech critic
remarked, "The only bar that the law school graduate Hrabal ever came
close to was the one in any number of Prague's pubs," where he is
tremendously popular). A jack-of-all-trades who has worked as a traveling
salesman, notary's clerk, postman, dealer in scrap paper, stagehand, and
