#OFIARA OBTAINED

[chicago-geniza]

OFIARA (PDF, NOT GREAT QUALITY, WORDS CUT OFF ETC., BUT--!!! FULL TEXT!!) OBTAINED

[chicago-geniza]

all the reviews of "ofiara" (stefania zahorska's holocaust novel, which transposes the akedah into the tatras, adding a conspiratorial subplot & a psychoanalytic gloss) complain that the parable never resolves into a conclusion, not even a rorschach blot or optical illusion, where multiple "meanings" can be parsed depending on perspective; rather, they say, it must be "mystical," because the story ends so ambiguously it forces all the accumulated symbols & narratives to resist their customary interpretations--to resist interpretation at all! & i'm sitting here poring over reviews of this book from 1955, almost totally forgotten, out of print, nigh-impossible to obtain, which i've only read a summary & some lengthy excerpts of, like. you are describing...The Kafkaesque (TM). have been saying for 84 years that stefania's later work, especially her work with biblical parable, is basically "what if 'before the law' was documentalist prose about WWII", & its formal complexity has not been recognized because it's been overshadowed by genre & subject matter, but most of all by the time & place in which it was published, the historical circumstances of its reception.