Edvardson, Cordelia. Burned Child Seeks the Fire: A Memoir. Translated by Joel Agee. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Hardcover, 128 pp. ISBN: 0-807-07094-7

Cordelia Edvardson blurs binaries in her writing: terror can feel inevitable, pride close to self-loathing, hunger brings weakness that is half resignation. In Burned Child Seeks the Fire - a new English translation of her 1984 memoir - Edvardson details her experiences as a child and adolescent of Jewish heritage in wartime Berlin and Auschwitz. Her brief chapters map strong, conflicted images and urgent relationships: the excitement of being caught and whirled around at a party; a stepfather whose anger both shelters and injures; a mother the narrator remembers as vivid yet ambivalent, a journalist whose postwar descriptions of Auschwitz are unrecognizable to her grown daughter.

Raised as a Catholic in Berlin, made to wear the Judenstern and removed from her more socially acceptable, "Aryan" parents to live in seclusion with other Jews and later deported, at age 14, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the girl Edvardson evokes in fierce and thoughtful prose is a real child. She wets her pants in fear but is inspired in school by a young female Nazi recruit. At Auschwitz, she comes to recognize that the strange, sweet smell that hovers over the concentration camp is connected with the piles of emaciated bodies outside the barracks. Living with death, forming uneasy ties with other inmates, Cordelia stays alive in part through her awareness of the importance of not seeming to submit: "The girl knew what to do: stand up straight, look him in the eye, show that you're strong and willing to work!" (81-82).

Shifting in time between Cordelia's pre-war young girlhood and her experience as a prisoner with numbers tatooed on her arm, moving to her conflicted rescue and "salvation" in Sweden at the war's end and her finding of a spiritual home in Israel, this memoir holds you with its evocation of all that is wrong, yet strangely goes on. It is about a child's tenacity and a life changed by persecution and terror, a glimpse of a girl and woman whose "life is burst and splintered" (89), who also can shout: "`I am here!'" (90).

Jennifer Love
Department of English, UNR