Jewish Mother from Berlin and Susanna

When poet Kolmar's voice was silenced at Auschwitz almost 55 years ago, she also left two prose works, now published here in English for the first time. Written in 1931 and 1940, respectively, each of these novellas is a psychological portrait of a solitary social misfit, a surreal characterization set against the political and social realities of pre-war Berlin. The title story describes the ordeal of widowed Martha Jadassohn, who descends into grief and madness after her four-year-old daughter is kidnapped and raped. To mitigate the guilt she feels for not having prevented the tragedy, and to assuage her desire for revenge, Jadassohn embarks upon a hunt for her daughter's rapist, an obsessive search that takes her to all corners of a decadent and indifferent 1920s Berlin. Incapable of loving again, she eventually realizes she cannot overcome her grief and resume her life; suicide is the only option. In Susanna, the beautiful and orphaned young protagonist lives in a fantasy world of her own creation. When she falls in love with a young man in her village, her guardian tries to protect her from emotional and physical exploitation. But Susanna, oblivious to reality and fiercely loyal to her own passion for life, refuses to be shielded from heartbreak. Kolmar has a poet's sharp eye for detail, and her writing is suitably restrained and unadorned. Yet her affinity for lengthy description slows the momentum and destroys the suspense in her stories, and only her main characters are fully drawn. In addition, much of the language here is stiff and old-fashioned, perhaps the result of an awkward translation. Still, despite only a few references to anti-Semitism and events of the Nazi era, these novellas eerily foreshadow the Holocaust by documenting their protagonists' outsider status and powerlessness in the face of evil. (Apr.)