The Woman from Hamburg

"Elegant, multi-layered narratives....Krall's deceptively artless prose speaks of real events with the power of fiction."--"The New York Times Book Review" In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals the surprising ways the lives of World War II survivors are shaped by the twists and turns of history. A young American architect learns Polish to communicate with his "dybbuk," the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. A high-ranking German officer conceives a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland. And in the title story, which was excerpted in the New Yorker, a signmaker's daughter learns that her mother is not the woman who raised her but a mysterious stranger living in Germany. Krall's deceptively neutral tone draws her readers into a world in which love, hatred, compassion, and indifference appear where we least expect them, illuminating the tragic, the fortunate, and the surreal with equal skill.