Why You'll Love This
It's a fairy tale about the Holocaust — and that shouldn't work, yet it devastates completely.
- Great if you want: a profound emotional gut-punch in under two hours
- The experience: spare and hypnotic — grief wrapped in the gentlest possible language
- The writing: Grumberg uses fairy-tale cadence to say what realism cannot bear to
- Skip if: fairy-tale framing around historical atrocity feels wrong to you
About This Book
In the depths of a vast forest, a woodcutter and his wife live in poverty while war rages at the edges of their quiet world. When the wife discovers a bundled infant near the railway tracks, she makes a choice that could cost her everything — and a Jewish father, riding toward an unspeakable destination, makes a choice no parent should ever face. Jean-Claude Grumberg takes the darkest chapter of modern history and holds it inside the oldest, most enduring container imaginable: a fairy tale. The result is a story that carries the full weight of the Holocaust while remaining achingly tender, a testament to how ordinary courage and love persist even when the world has lost its mind.
What makes this book remarkable is the way Grumberg wields the fairy-tale form not as decoration but as precision instrument. The spare, incantatory prose — once upon a time, in an enormous forest — creates a strange protective distance that somehow makes the grief hit harder, not softer. At just over a hundred pages, every sentence earns its place. This is writing that trusts silence, trusts the reader, and understands that the smallest stories can hold the largest truths.