Traces: Stories

Appropriately enough, this heartbreaking collection begins with ""The End,"" an account of the precise moment in 1938 when the German invasion first impinges on the lives of two young Polish lovers. A mood of crushing fatalism runs through the book: its subject is the prelude to and aftermath of genocide, and Fink has no interest in easy sentiment or cheap optimism. Septuagenarian Fink (The Journey), who is herself a Holocaust survivor, writes in Polish, and her stories take place in a series of almost interchangeable Polish cities, towns and villages. Her vocabulary is simple, almost coldly precise, and the 21 stories here are little more than vignettes, jumbles of finely observed details that delicately illustrate the daily lives of her characters, often young women, as the events of the Holocaust overtake them. The traces of the title are the little scraps of information that remain behind when the forces of war conspire to erase a human being. These traces take many forms: an initial carved in an attic hideaway; the features of a lost lover, rediscovered in his twin sister's face; the neurotic symptoms that betray the presence of buried trauma; and the stories themselves, which cast an almost painfully steady gaze on heroes and villains, strong and weak, mourners and mourned alike. First serial to the New Yorker, Story, Venue and the Threepenny Review. (Aug.)