Reviews

Ghosts from the Holocaust whisper, shout, moan and weep throughout these fragmented fictional "recollections" of the Vilna ghetto between 1937 and 1944. If 1930s Warsaw was the heart of Judaism, claims Ferreira in her prologue to this searing debut novel, Vilna was its "muscled right arm, the refined hand, the lively fingers." Ordered by the SS to create a Jewish repertory theater, Raissa Gellerman and her lesbian lover, Violeta, become its writers; Raissa's brother, Benyamin, its director; and his wife, Fayge, its leading singer. Five others patch ragged costumes, translate plays and build rickety sets in the same theater that housed Vilna's first wave of deportees, 7,000 Jews who were dispatched to the death camps in three days. The ironic horror of these scraps of lives, transmitted in fitfully brilliant prose, is that readers know all of the little company will perish, but as each man or woman comes to terms with imminent death, each offers a shard of the Vilna Jews' collective Holocaust experience. The group's numb, dumb endurance of the unspeakable is impossible to forget. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.