Time Without Bells (English and German Edition) - Hardcover

Bienek, Horst

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689119305 ISBN 13: 9780689119309

Publisher: Atheneum, 1988

Synopsis

Upper Silesia during World War II forms the background for this tale of a culture on the verge of disappearing

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Reviews

On Good Friday, 1943, in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, the Catholic villagers put on their shabbiest clothes, eat sparingly and take their accustomed paths to church. They arrive as the bells are being removed for the sacred sake of the Wehrmacht: "When the bells go, faith goes too," says Anna Ossadnik, whose son Andy had risen that morning from a dream of Christ on the cross. Throughout this Good Friday, a wide swath is cut through the Gleiwitz population. The movements of two families, the Ossadniks and the Pionteks, unroll like a film strip, and those of many not altogether peripheral others come into focus. Thus we watch a train driven by Anna's husband pick up a herd of Gleiwitz Jews and dump them at Birkenau. We glimpse the hidden passion of a respectable lawyer for a younger man, the imprisonment of a servant after she consorts with a laborer conscripted from the East, the torment of a woman about to give birth and of her brother, still a schoolboy, with a draft notice in his pocket. Bells, Bienek is saying, ring out both in joy and sadness. As this splendid, rich, unforgettable book amply demonstrates, happinessonly relative anywaydwells alongside pain in humdrum daily life. This is the third novel (after The First Polka and September Light) in the prize-winning German author's tetralogy. Thanks to his subtle understanding and also to a sensitive translation, the mystery that informs the ordinary is here both deepened and revealed.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"A time without bells is a time without faith," comments a resident of Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia in 1943. On Good Friday the Nazi government has taken the bronze churchbells for war production. Easter weekend brings other losses: young men killed fighting and younger men drafted; lovers parted; violence by confused youths. As spring flowers blossom and a young mother enters labor, the town's Jews take a forced train ride to a "work camp." Through dozens of haunting scenes and portraits of Gleiwitz and its inhabitants, this rich novel embodies the exhaustion of ordinary people in extraordinary times. The third in a tetraology by an acclaimed German writer; large fiction collections will want all. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689119305
• ISBN 13: 9780689119309
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338