The work of contemporary Austrian Jewish writer Ilse Aichinger was once called by her husband, Günter Eich, an "artifact of life." Aichinger's writings are imaginative, experimental, and often hermetic in nature. Yet, although her fictional and lyrical work includes few direct references to reality, her poetic search for a language that resists power and manipulation and lends the force of the imagination to the helpless and the victimized is closely linked to her own Holocaust experiences.

Aichinger and her twin sister, Helga, were born in Vienna on 1 November 1921 to Ludwig Aichinger, a Gentile schoolteacher from Upper Austria, and Berta Kremer Aichinger, a Jewish doctor whose father served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian imperial army; Ilse's grandfather was an engineer who participated in the construction of the railway station in the Polish village Oswieciem (Auschwitz) years before the Germans built the camp that traumatically marked Ilse...