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In teaching ‘A Spring Morning’ I am guided by the Holocaust scholar Sara Horowitz’s influential reading of the story as an example of how literature challenges history. Today she is considered one of the major writers of the Shoah, her beautiful, enigmatic, and often very short stories earning praise for their depiction of the devastation wrought by the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union and the trauma of survival. There she began writing stories, but for decades no one would publish them. After the war she returned to Poland before emigrating to Israel in 1957. She was interned in the Zbarazh ghetto until 1942, when she and her sister acquired false papers, smuggled themselves out of the ghetto, and began a dangerous life as Ukrainian volunteer workers in Germany. Her studies at the conservatory in Lvov (Fink was a pianist) came to an end with the beginning of the war. Fink was born in Zbarahz (then Poland, now Ukraine) in 1921 to a secular and accomplished family (her mother had a doctorate in the sciences). But in recent years I have added Ida Fink’s ‘A Spring Morning’ to the syllabus, with good results. Students struggle to make sense of Holocaust fiction without a lot of context this course can’t provide.

But I don’t usually teach this material in my class on the short story. If I’m an expert at anything it’s Holocaust literature. As I’m sure this list has suggested, I’m no expert on the short story.