There is broad critical agreement that Tadeusz Borowski's stories are among the best that have been written by any writer, in any language, about the German concentration camp at Auschwitz. Borowski explored what Primo Levi called "the grey area" of...

Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin. Schocken Books, 348 pages, $25.When I entered college, in the mid-1960's, my freshman class was asked to read two books over the summer: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King...

In the following essay, Wirth argues that Borowski's short stories of the Holocaust represent the invention of a new conception of tragedy in literature that is suitable for expressing the horrors of twentieth-century crimes against humanity.

In the following review, Shechner applauds Borowski's emotionally restrained narrative style and detached voice as appropriate to the author's task of “bearing witness” for those who did not survive the Holocaust.