“I’m not typical,” says one of Stanislaw Benski’s characters, an elderly Polish-born Jew who, while most of his life a resident of Warsaw, spent his youth among relatives in New York City. “I saw no Nazis, SS-men, or Gestapo, I never laid eyes on a German soldier, and never heard a bomb or a mine explode. . . . Nobody in my family perished, nobody was gassed, nobody was shot in the forest or starved to death in the Ghetto.” Seemingly alone among his contemporaries, he did not fight in the underground or suffer in a camp, and, as the great exception, feels himself to be somehow less than real. He is missing that piece of personal history that would define him as one of his generation, as a witness and survivor, as one of the last of the very last.
“I write about the few remaining Polish Jews,” Benski says in a note to his readers, “about their dreams, joys, and sorrows. I write about the last residents of small villages, the shtetlach, about the pious and the impious, the honest and dishonest, the intelligent and the simple, about those who are forever seeing the ghetto walls and the chimneys of the crematoria. I am among them, and I am one of them. I try to preserve their memory.” A decorated veteran of the Polish Army who lost his parents and brother in the war, Benski began writing fiction in 1960, when he was thirty-eight, and between then and his death two years ago published two novels and five short-story collections. Missing Pieces is his first book to appear in English; it contains sixteen stories published in Poland between 1979 and 1987. Most concern the residents of a Warsaw nursing home —Benski was long the director of the city’s State Social Welfare Home for the Aged—and all touch, directly or indirectly, on the lives of old men and women who sometimes think “it was easier to live through the war than it is to live through the memories of it.”
There is something of an Old Testament clarity and directness about these stories.
There is something of an Old Testament clarity and directness about these stories—they are all solid nouns and forceful verbs and characters who bare themselves in every word and deed. The sentences are as simple as the artist can make them and are rendered by Walter Arndt into an English of beautiful utility. Few of these stories run more than eight pages, some consist almost entirely of dialogue, and all make use of a primer-like vocabulary; they are minimal in every respect except their moral content, reminding one that minimalism in fiction need not be synonymous with trivialism. One finishes this collection moved by its very austerity, and with the hope that other books by Benski will soon make their way into English. By the evidence of Missing Pieces, he is surely among the minor masters of recent East European fiction.