Fugitive Pieces Study Guide & Notes

Fugitive Pieces Plot Summary

Preview of Fugitive Pieces Summary:

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels is partly a memoir by the poet Jakob Beer about his life as a Holocaust survivor and reflections on Jakob's poetry by a scholar, Ben, who is indebted for helping him understand his Holocaust-surviving and scarred parents. It is about struggling to cope with the past.

Fugitive Pieces is divided unequally into two parts. In Book I, sixty-year-old poet/scientist Jakob Beer looks back over his life from the time he escapes death at the hands of the Nazis until he succeeds in writing poetry, splitting his time between Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and his adoptive home during World War II, Greece. He owes his survival after his family is killed and his rich education to a Greek geologist, Athanasios (Athos) Roussos, who happens upon him in the mud of Poland and spirits him off to Greece. There he opens to Jakob all of the mysteries of...
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