No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn

Alina Bacall-Zwirn was born Alinka Handszer in Warsaw, Poland, in 1922. Married in the Warsaw ghetto and a survivor of four Nazi concentration camps, she immigrated to the United States with her husband in 1949. Alina died in 1997, one month after completing her testimony. Jared Stark is Assistant Professor of Literary Cultures at the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.

"Achingly honest and sensitively narrated, No Common Place is no common memoir. Weaving together testimony, dialogue, letters, and documents, it moves with grace between the past and the present. Through these seamless transitions, we learn--or perhaps remember anew--that the past is not really past; it lives on in us and in our families. This is an extraordinary and most welcome addition to Holocaust literature."--Deborah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University. "Through its rare and moving commitment to the authenticity of the survivor's voice, No Common Place conveys both the lacerating details of Alina Bacall-Zwirn's past and the deeply humanizing story of her efforts to leave a legacy of memory to her children and to future generations. Jared Stark's sensitive arrangement of this testimony allows us to hear the urgency and vulnerability of her voice as she recalls the atrocities she and her community suffered. Stark's book is a contribution both to the historical record and to the crucial study of what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust."--Geoffrey Hartman, project director of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University "Lacking in any sentimentality or drama, and told in a series of interviews by a woman who never quite mastered English, this powerful story illustrates the impossibility of weaving a coherent narrative from the shattered memories of those years. At the same time the reader gradually discovers the extraordinary strength of the love which sustains both Leo and Alina. Only the knowledge that Leo is somewhere with her in Auschwitz enables her to go on after the death of her baby. Only by finding each other after the war can they reconstruct at least the semblance of a normal life and bring up a family whose children have now re-entered the mainstream of humanity from which Nazism had plucked out their parents."--Times Literary Supplement, December 15, 2000