The Woman from Hamburg

April 18, 2005
The grim and the surreal portentously collide in Krall's 12 genre-bending pieces, all shadowed by the brutal facts of the Holocaust. In "Hamlet," Andrzej Czajkowski, a Polish piano impresario and composer who survived WWII as a child hiding in wardrobes, bequeaths his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the supernatural "Dybbuk," an American professor of architecture tries to exorcise the tormented spirit of his half-brother, who disappeared in a Jewish ghetto. "Phantom Pain" draws the life of Alex von dem B., a German officer who lost a leg on the Eastern front and plotted to assassinate Hitler after witnessing a massacre of Jews. Conspiracies resurface in "The Back of the Eye"—backlit by Cold War terrorism and the violence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang—in which Stefan, the son of a concentration camp survivor, serves a life sentence for a 1977 abduction and murder. A lineage mystery centers the fine folkloric title tale, though digressive genealogies obfuscate and confuse minor and major characters elsewhere. These investigations are stitched with information culled from diverse sources: interviews, an encyclopedia, state archives, diary entries, photographs and letters. Krall's (Shielding the Flame
, etc.) prose is compressed, unadorned and journalistic. Braiding history with imagination, she produces necessary accounts that incisively unveil and interrogate the ruptured historical legacy of Jews after WWII.