There are many books based on expe­ri­ences of Jew­ish chil­dren and ado­les­cents dur­ing the Holo­caust, bio­graph­i­cal and fic­tion­al, and, like this book, some are an amal­ga­ma­tion of both, but this one is par­tic­u­lar­ly fine. Lip­szyc can take a sto­ry gained through a retelling or an inter­view, then pace it and reframe it so that prose becomes poet­ry in her writ­ing, some­times leav­ing the read­er breath­less. Even dead­ly real­i­ty becomes slight­ly mys­ti­cal and is made grace­ful by her telling. Through the forests, in the ghet­tos, with­in the dev­as­ta­tion and hor­ror, how does she find a sort of poet­ry? From The Singers on Grodz­ka Street: ​“At the end of the tun­nel, in the open, near the pots of burn­ing coals, stood bagel ped­dlers eager to sell their hot rings of bread sprin­kled with pop­py seed or salt .…beg­gars who arrived at the scene chant­i­ng their pleas for groschen in an unend­ing chain of lament.” In Mer­chants of Mer­cy, even while talk­ing about the tri­als of beg­ging in the ghet­to, the chil­dren who have been sub­ject to the police, to bul­lies, to the divi­sion of food after each one has begged, to the loss of a com­pan­ion who has been shot, remind her of a dis­card­ed pic­ture that resem­bles their three­some, as they were before. She picks it up and digs at the bur­ial site, bury­ing the pic­ture there; a memo­r­i­al. The mother’s tragedy in the Death Watch­er is unfor­get­table, as is the peace and hope for the future, in Vers­es for My Priest. These sto­ries do not dwell in one coun­try or in one type of locale; this book defies such char­ac­ter­i­za­tions. The tales are valid, but sel­dom lit­er­al. They roam the ghet­tos, the camps and the for­est. Beau­ti­ful­ly told heart­break­ing short sto­ries that are total­ly com­pelling, they are tak­en from a vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions and locales.