GENRE AND STYLE FEATURES OF IDA FINK’S COLLECTION “THE GARDEN FLOATS AWAY”

Abstract

The article examines the short prose of the Israeli writer Ida Fink from the collection “The Garden Floats” from the point of view of its genre and stylistic features. It is significant that the writer belongs to the first generation of writers who interpreted the tragedy of the Holocaust in an artistic form, who were themselves its witnesses and victims, bearers of traumatic experience, which had a great impact on the subject matter, main motives and style of the works. A comprehensive analysis of the structure of the collection was carried out, as a result of which three groups of short prose were distinguished according to the chronological principle of depicting the tragedy of the genocide of the Jewish during the Second World War: works about pre-war events and the beginning of the occupation; works about mass murders of Jews or the catastrophe; works about post-war events. The conventionality of such a classification is justified, since each individual work belonging to a certain group contains a whole complex of different motives, ideas, facts, details, displacement or combination of different time layers. It is shown that belonging to one or another thematic and temporal group does not always determine the place of the work in the structure of the entire collection, i.e. the author as a compiler does not always follow the chronology of the Holocaust, mixing memories of pre-war peaceful life and works with post-war themes, in order to deepen the overall picture of the tragedy. Emphasis is placed on the main feature of Ida Fink’s writing, which consists in creating her own artistic concept of “shades of time”, which is both a means of depicting a disaster and a self-sufficient image of the tragic experience of both her people and her own life. Among the genre diversity of the collection, autobiographical and biographical stories, stories with the features of a treatise, action novels and storyless novels were selected and analyzed.