So the problem of these stories is how do you get people to talk. Now you may remember that early in the quarter I talked about. Jewish writing, and quoted a friend who said that Jewish writing is two Jews talking, that literature written by Jews is about a narrator and a listener, and those of you interested in linguistics and computers know that there is a signal and that which receives the signal, right, and we could play with that. So, I'm proposing that A Scrap of Time is, even more than Facebook, it's dynamic. And so I was toying with this. I said, should we call it Jews' Book? And that time in the Jews Book' family album Is both dynamic, it's changing all the time, and also is a scrap of time, so it involves us in more than listening, and touching, and seeing. And so his collection of stories asks us, what is a scrap of time? And she says right away it's measured not in months, not this was a beautiful month of May But after the first [FOREIGN], action, or the second, or the third, or after the children were brought out, right? And murdered. And there's a whole longer story. I think it's the third story in the book called Behind The Hedge. You may remember Behind The Hedge as the story of a servant and an old woman, and neither of them is Jewish, and they're talking about the garden that was planted and what is behind the hedge. There's a hedge. It provides some kind of shelter and then there's the flowers and the old woman is thinking about it, and she's dependent upon her servant Agafia, and she says, we have to think about this. There's also a little moment when The Nazis are there and this is a nice house with a garden, but somehow the servant has figured out a way to keep the Nazis from requisitioning the house. There's just a little moment there, you should see if you can find out how she does this. The servant gets out and about and sees things, the owner, whose husband has died, is in a wheelchair and she's dependent on the servant to tell her what is happening. So again we have now a bystander and a witness, and remember, this is probably all taking place in different parts of Poland, and, as Peter has told us, the Nazis put their death camps in Poland because they didn't care that the Poles would know about this. So we have lots of bystanders, lots of witnesses. And Agathea tells about going to get some flour, and suddenly realizing the horse on the cart knows something bad is happening. She stops and then they hear the shots. They wait. They suddenly realize where they're sitting they can see things, and one of things they see is a very beautiful young girl, young Jewish girl, and as is, the way the Nazis did it, everybody takes off their clothes, they dig their grave, and the young girl is so beautiful, that the soldier who was told to kill her, can't do it. So we suddenly see, she sees, Agafia sees, that another man rushes over and pushes the soldier aside and kills the young girl, and Agafia says, and she had little fingers and you see them as she falls into the grave. Why is Agafia telling her patron, her boss about this? Because they both remember that, a day before, the boss in her wheelchair was out there looking at the garden and suddenly she sees this young girl, Lying, she says, half naked behind the hedge, and the young girl behind the hedge. She's 15, is making love with a young boy, and this older woman yells at them, and says, at your age! How could you do this? The young girl said she's sorry, but the older woman yells at her again, whereupon the young girl answers and says, the only thing we're allowed to do is to be killed. This is very direct, and it's this young girl whom the servant sees killed. This is very direct narration, very direct story telling, but we know who's telling it and to whom. The story is called Behind The Hedge. These stories deserve the kind of analysis that poetry gets. In fact, I tell people when I teach poetry, you should memorize poetry. Perhaps one of these stories should be memorized by you. Perhaps they will be burned into your consciousness and you will have memorized them whether you know it or not. So, these stories are dynamic, they're snapshots, as I said, they are all kinds of different stories. There's a diary story, there's a memoir story, there's a history. Some of them are religious. Some are existential but all of them in some ways are bildungsromans about how some character got crystallized and as bildungsroman, there's somebody speaking in the story to somebody else, but there's also somebody speaking to us, and there's a bystander and a witness and a speaker. So my hypothesis, and it's up to you to tell me if it was really too many late nights, or too many early mornings. Do these stories make us, the reader, who are the receivers of these stories, into witnesses? And then if this is the Jews' Book Facebook, Are these stories in some ways selfies, right? You all know what a selfie is. You do it all the time. But these are stories of us. That Agafia's boss is very upset because this could be her. She too could be condemned to death. And maybe she knows that in the Nazi program, after the Jews, the Poles. So, these stories, then, are stories that are addressed to us, the reader. In what way does the reader become a witness? And so I've now proposed something to you that's very much what you know in your daily lives. The witness is someone who is inscribed in the story, and the story then is a self-picture. In this dynamic way. Well, I think I should give you some more possible examples.
