The Color of Time and Other Stories
Short Fiction
BlazeVOX [books], 2025
$18.00, 138 pages ISBN: 978-1-60964-519-9
The eight stories that make up Barbara Krasner’s riveting collection all involve Holocaust survivors. They are full of suffering but also resilience. The characters carry deep scars, but there is also triumph, even redemption. The stories are set all around the world, from Newark, New Jersey, to Poland, Ukraine, Paris, Prague, Amsterdam, a 1966 Borscht Belt hotel in the Catskills, Lithuania and Belarus. The survivors try to reconcile with the past, to locate loved ones or simply to understand their fates. Ghosts, haunting memories, and surreal dreams follow the characters throughout.
Indeed, in the title story, after a disappointing day hawking his paintings to well-to-do guests at Grossinger’s (or maybe it’s Kutscher’s), hapless Larry Kibbitzer, an amateur painter and sometime-comedian – a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania – falls asleep among his paintings in his Greenwich Village studio only to awaken and find himself a bunny (or a goat or a deer or a horse) in a Marc Chagall painting (the painter in the dream calls himself Moyshe Shagal of Belarus). Once again, he is fleeing the Nazis.
In the first story, “Tesserae,” set in the Polish border town of Zaromb, Yankl Dovid sees the writing on the wall. Refugees – bezshentses – pour into town fleeing the Nazis, and his own brother Ayzik is probably dead, victim of a pogrom. At the prompting of his wife Tishka, Yankl Dovid decides to move the family to Uzbekistan. His son Simkhe, however, has joined the Soviet army to fight the Nazis. The future is still very much in flux.
The last belonging Yankl Dovid takes before the family goes to the train station is the mezuzah at the doorpost, “the guardian of ancient Israel’s doors.” At the train station he gives the mezuzah, formed with the bits of glass alluded to in the story title, to his son, a pledge for the future, for a reunified family. The mezuzah works as a symbol, like Noah’s rainbow, for the stories ahead. Perhaps there’s even a suggestion of Kristalnacht in the image.
In the rest of the stories, the Holocaust has already happened, and these survivors are coping with their trauma. Indeed, the next time Krasner takes us to Zaromb, in “The Guardian,” the Jews have already been wiped out. Krasner begins:
Jasio remembered the day in September 1941, when Papa,
bloodied and calloused, dragged himself through the door and
announced the Jews were gone and would never return.
Papa lied
Jasio knew this, because one Jew did come back to Zaręby
Kościelne after the war. Police Chief Gorski shot him dead with one
bullet through his head in the middle of the market square.
Yet there is a sort of redemption at the end when the protagonist, Jasio, is able to restore some documents of her grandparents to an American Jewish woman who has come looking for evidence of her ancestors’ lives. Jasio also hands her a bag of mezuzot, which he had recovered from the Jewish homes the day after the Jews were compelled to leave Zaromb (also known as Zaręby Kościelne).
In “Stones Tell No Lies,” Jake, the protagonist (his original name was Yankl), goes to Paris in search of his grandmother’s gravesite. He and his family had spent their lives running away from their Jewish identity, disguising it, muting it. “He didn’t want to die for being born a Jew.”
In Paris, Jake finds so much more. His Aunt Delphine, whose existence he hadn’t ever known about, is living in his Bobe’s house. Reunifying the family is a triumph. Contrast this with Srul/Isaac, the protagonist of “I, Divided,” who is being interviewed by a journalist to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
“The yizkor book was my way to remember. To memorialize,
you understand this? My family was never buried. There are no
gravestones, no inscriptions. I had to erect that matsevah with words
what I couldn’t do with stone.”
Isaac, too, finds some solace in family. Reluctant to spill the beans to the interviewer (“I don’t want to relive this,” he thinks to himself), at story’s end he takes his grandson aside to tell him about his forebears.
“The Last Survivor” is another story in which a Holocaust survivor is being interviewed, to preserve the memories. Branca, “the last living Holocaust survivor,” has been taken back to Prague, where she’d lived when the Holocaust happened, by the television production team. Branca had spent time in the Terezin, the Nazis’ Czech concentration camp. By now, she’s experienced at giving Holocaust interviews. Krasner writes, “She had become a pro at public speaking, starting with a Shoah event at her local synagogue.” Like several other survivors in these stories, Branca hears her dead mother calling to her.
And then there is “The Diaries,” set in Amsterdam, about the difficulties in preserving Anne Frank’s memory. The protagonist, Dirk Vandenberg, works against the odds to help Anne’s father get the diaries published and to establish the “Anne Frank House.” It turns out Dirk’s father Pieter had collaborated with the Nazis to give away precious artworks. He is also, to his son’s horror, a serious Jew-hater. “‘Jews are not Dutch,’ his father said. ‘They are Jews.’” Working against all of these pressures, Dirk succeeds in his mission.
Interestingly, one Arnold Van den Bergh (the name sure sounds similar) may have been the person who ratted out the Franks to the Germans. While Krasner’s account of Dirk’s struggles to preserve Anne’s memory reads almost like history, though, surely “The Diaries” is a fictional rendering that underscores the theme of preserving history.
In “Newcomer,” set in Newark, New Jersey, Leo is having trouble adjusting to life in the United States. He’s an engineer by training, but his degree is deemed worthless by the man who interviews him for a job at Westinghouse, so he continues to punch holes in leather to make belts in a sweatshop. His brother’s family tries to set him up with a woman, Bella, also a Holocaust survivor. But Leo is tormented by a ghosts. He thinks he sees his wife on a streetcorner in Newark. It’s something of a disaster. But even here the story ends with a hint of recovery. While shaving for his date with Bella – she’s given him another chance – Leo thinks:
There are furrows, too, between the rolled rocks. What lays
before me are my memories. Hard and fast, they surround me on all
sides. It’s easy in Siberia to forget yourself, your past, your family, even
your name in the vastness of nothing until splotches of red dot the
landscape. I stick bits of tissue over my nicks. Bella won’t mind.
The stories in The Color of Time and Other Stories are compelling and heart-wrenching, but they do not wallow in despair as they so easily could. Barbara Krasner writes about healing and recovery while not letting go of the need to confront the horrors of history as they actually happened.