The Subtenant / To Outwit God

"Outwit God" is the same as "Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation With Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" under ISBN-10: 0030060028. It is a first class account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - a very small Jewish resistance against Nazis during the Holocaust of World War II - from its only surviving leader. There is no better information on the subject. It was well written and reads smoothly, but the subject is... death. "The Subtenant" is a less known novel about surviving the Holocaust of a Jewish girl rescued from imminent death at Nazi's hands by a Polish family. It is semi-biographical, since Hanna Krall was also such a girl, and the Polish family bears her name. The main theme is a search for identity - shaped by tragic events - and the complicated Polish-Jewish-German relations during the World War II and following years, including 1968 starting another persecution of Jews in Poland. Krall depicts a deeper background of family's history and place, and writes her fiction like a fictionalized reportage: speeds up using ellipsis mark (3 dots), develops details into motif, comments from a position of author. Her strength lies in mixing truth and fiction, and not in a sophisticated construction.