[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping. A card index of all imaginable inhumanities. Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of army chaplains, expert opinions of concentration camp doctors, all joined together in a seemingly offhand manner… Fantasy and reality, invented and documentary matter have come together here in a unique mixture. Parody, properly handled, it has been said, can be the highest form of criticism.
—Amos Elon, Journey through a Haunted Land: The New Germany
Bogdan Wojdowski’s Polish Jewish novel Bread for the Departed (1971), based on his experiences as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto, is such modernist model which, through stream of consciousness, multiple voices, and various stylized uses of multiple languages (Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German), presents a fragmented, polyphonic kaleidoscope of the ghetto experience.
—Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust
Can a work of fiction begin with no overall plan, written in installments over a twenty-year period, and ending more than once, be called (as it has been here) a novel at all?
—Hillel Halkin, translator of Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman
