This autobiographical story by Christa Wolf provides a unique perspective on the final days of World War II, told from the viewpoint of a middle-aged German woman looking back on her time as a teenager fleeing the Russians with her family. Part of a column of refugees, she recounts being strafed by American fighter planes, learning of Hitler’s death, encountering a retreating Wehrmacht unit, and coming face-to-face with liberated concentration camp survivors. Ironically, some confronting experiences on reaching the “safety” of American lines leave her in tears. Themes: war, the vagaries of memory/selective amnesia, changing perspectives, dislocation, loss, death. More…
The Custodian
In this story by Deborah Eisenberg, two childhood friends from families of different financial means drift apart when the older girl goes to high school. However, they still share a common bond through child-minding jobs for a young woman and her “touchy-feely” college professor husband who live in “their” stone cottage. The story has an unusual structure: beginning at the end, returning to the beginning, then allowing readers to reach their own conclusion as to why the older girl’s family mysteriously whisks her out of town. Themes include friendship, social class, isolation, regret, infatuation, sexual predation/grooming. More…
A Cold Autumn
In this story by Ivan Bunin, a Russian woman reflects on a cold autumn morning thirty years earlier when she saw her fiancé off to war, never to return. After this, despite moments of happiness, her life spirals downward … she loses her parents and the family estate during the Revolution, ekes out a living in a Moscow market, marries but loses her husband two years later, and toils to raise his nephew’s infant daughter. She struggles on thanks to his commitment to wait for her in the afterlife. Themes include love, death, loss, time, memories, displacement, perseverance.. More…
The Piece of String
This Guy de Maupassant story involves a frugal farmer whose reputation is forever tarnished after a rival falsely accuses him of finding and failing to return a lost pocketbook. Sadly, he is the victim of a stereotype about “Norman craftiness”. No matter how much he protests that he picked up a piece of string, and even in the face of another peasant coming forward with the pocketbook, nobody will believe him. This weighs so much on the proud man’s mind that he wastes away to an early death. Themes: false accusations, stereotyping, injustice, pride, obsession with image/reputation. More…
How to Tell a True War Story
This metafictional story by Tim O’Brien uses observations on a small collection of stories related by soldiers to highlight the difficulty of faithfully communicating one’s wartime experiences. His central argument is that in war it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen and therefore you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself. This leads to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true. Themes include the nature of truth in storytelling, memories vs. imagination, the trauma of war, morality. More…