Children and Fools     by Erich Fried, Translated by M Chalmers Original title: Kinder und Narren Original language: German Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: January 1995 Format: Paperback Dimensions: 0.55 x 7.74 x 5.04 in. ISBN: 1852422114 List Price: $14.99, £9.53 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.53 Buy online from Amazon.com for $14.99 Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Paperback, 192 pages List Price: £4.99 Not available for ordering Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Paperback, 168 pages List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

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Children and Fools is an extraordinary collection of thirty-four short prose pieces by a Jewish Austrian poet who was exiled from Vienna as a teenager. Fried settled in England and some of the best pieces in the book are sad/amusing vignettes of Austrian exile life set in North London.

This is a poet’s book, with a poet’s sudden unexpected swooping down onto bright fragments of truth; sometimes found in minor but illuminating objects or moments; the day (The Green Suite) when the green sofa, the Viennese grandmother’s lifetime pride and joy, is finally ignominiously lugged up into the attic (prefiguring her own end) or the little handful of damp ‘sand’ picked up at Auschwitz (in My Doll at Auschwitz) that, casually pocketed, turns out, back at the hotel, to be composed of human bone fragments; the sole remains of millions of exterminated people.

There is no avoiding the shadow of Nazism that passed over Fried’s life — his father was beaten to death by a Gestapo officer who, he notes, later pursued a successful career in West Germany, and the Grandmother touchingly described in The Green Suite was ‘transported’ at the age of 76, blind and frail, to be executed by other good citizens of Greater Germany. The charming, humorous tales of pre-1938 Vienna are mixed with pieces about the succeeding barbarism and bittersweet stories of exile — of love and friendship but also desperate attempts to get relatives out of Nazi Austria.

There are also some satirical pieces about the postwar world concerning different kinds of terror. Tortoise Turning is an ironic fantasy about contemporary power brokers like the oil companies, destroying the planet while distracting us with adverts featuring the odd wild animal they are ‘protecting’ and The Real which is on the final perfection of the extermination Hitler started piecemeal through the deployment of nuclear weapons.

It is however the most autobiographical pieces, mainly at the end of the book, including My Heroic Age, The Unworthy Families, Three Library Users, Läzchen and Fini that demand to be read and which provide an impeccably artistic and sympathetic account of times and people close enough to touch and far away enough to forget.

‘One day a few of those who were not taken to the gas chambers right away are said to have called out at the end, «Watch out, we don’t burn well! More will be left of us than you bargained for! Our smoke will suffocate you!»

These were their last words before they were burned. Their predictions have not, however, come true. They burned well, very well even, care had been taken of that. Although petrol was already in short supply then, it had not been spared, and had been poured or sprayed on most shortly beforehand. «Emergency baptism» it was called by the others, who drove them into the fire, the last part with long poles, in order not to come too close to the flames themselves.

Not one of the drivers and commanders of the drivers were suffocated by the smoke of those burning. From experience they knew very well how far back they had to stand and also that they had to take account of the wind. And since these burnings, which they used to call «Minor Resettlement Without Special Facilities», were basically an insignificant, little noticed episode which was not to be compared to the simultaneous so-called «Major Resettlement Action» with the Zyklon-B crystals manufactured by Degesch, the German Pest Control Company [Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung], they also did not attract much attention, and some of the burners who later returned to their homeland, still live today as respected elderly gentlemen in their postwar professions, or as pensioners, loved by their grandchildren. The last words of the burned were therefore mistaken at best.’ p59-60