Point of View

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels has two narrators, the poet Jakob Beer, and Ben (no last name given), a devote of Jakob's poetry and scholar of his life and work. Both speak in the first person, past tense. Long Book I, Jakob's part, appears to be at least the draft of a memoir penned on Idhra Island, Greece, weeks before his and second wife Michaela's untimely death in Athens. A one-page preface by an unspecified hand gives particulars. Book II is addressed to Jakob, posthumously by Ben, telling Jakob how his poetry has helped him deal with his own dysfunctional family. Both narrators are children of Holocaust survivors.

Jakob tells of his life in Biskupin, Poland, crashing in as the Nazis kill his parents and remove his beloved sister Bella to an unknown but surely horrible fate. He hides, terrified, in forest and river, until a...