The Color of Time and Other Stories by Barbara Krasner reviewed in Tupelo Quarterly
We’re delighted to share that Charles Rammelkamp has written a thoughtful and expansive review of The Color of Time and Other Stories by Barbara Krasner, now published in Tupelo Quarterly (February 28, 2026), in an issue celebrating literary criticism.
Rammelkamp’s review situates Krasner’s eight-story collection as both harrowing and restorative. Each story centers on Holocaust survivors, figures who carry profound loss and trauma, yet who persist in acts of memory, reconciliation, and, at times, unexpected grace. As he observes, while suffering permeates the book, it does not define it. What emerges instead is resilience: lives rebuilt across Newark, Poland, Ukraine, Paris, Prague, Amsterdam, the Catskills, Lithuania, and Belarus.
The review opens with Krasner’s title story, in which Larry Kibbitzer, an amateur painter and Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, falls asleep in his Greenwich Village studio only to awaken transformed inside a painting by Marc Chagall (who calls himself Moyshe Shagal of Belarus in the dream). Once again, Larry is fleeing the Nazis. Rammelkamp highlights the story’s surrealism, noting how Krasner uses dream-logic not as escape, but as a way of dramatizing the inescapability of memory. Even art becomes a portal back into history.
From there, Rammelkamp traces the symbolic thread of the mezuzah introduced in “Tesserae,” set in the Polish border town of Zaromb. As refugees flood the town and danger mounts, Yankl Dovid removes the mezuzah from his doorpost before fleeing with his family, eventually passing it to his son at the train station. The mezuzah, crafted of glass tesserae, becomes both talisman and promise, a fragile but enduring emblem of continuity. Rammelkamp reads it as a recurring symbol across the collection, echoing biblical covenants and perhaps even Kristallnacht’s shattered glass.
In “The Guardian,” Krasner returns to Zaromb after the Jews have been eradicated. Rammelkamp underscores the stark opening lines and the brutality of postwar violence, yet also notes a quiet redemption: the restoration of family documents and mezuzot to an American Jewish woman seeking traces of her ancestors. Preservation becomes a moral act.
Throughout the review, Rammelkamp points to Krasner’s sustained attention to memory work. In “Stones Tell No Lies,” Jake travels to Paris seeking his grandmother’s gravesite, only to discover living family he never knew existed. In “I, Divided,” Isaac reflects that the yizkor book he created was his “matsevah with words”, a gravestone built from language because no stone markers exist for his murdered family. In “The Last Survivor,” Branca returns to Prague and Terezín with a television crew, navigating the uneasy space between testimony and performance. In “The Diaries,” set in Amsterdam, Dirk Vandenberg struggles to help establish the Anne Frank House while confronting his father’s anti-Semitism and collaboration. Rammelkamp notes how Krasner blends fiction with historical texture, underscoring the fragile but essential work of preserving truth.
Even in “Newcomer,” set in Newark, New Jersey, where Leo struggles to rebuild his life and identity after the war, the collection resists despair. Haunted by visions of his lost wife and diminished by professional rejection, Leo nonetheless moves tentatively toward human connection. Rammelkamp emphasizes Krasner’s refusal to romanticize suffering, yet also her refusal to let devastation have the final word.
In closing, Rammelkamp calls The Color of Time and Other Stories compelling and heart-wrenching, but never indulgent in grief. Krasner’s stories confront historical horror directly while illuminating healing, recovery, and the redemptive power of remembrance.
We’re grateful to Tupelo Quarterly for featuring this review and to Charles Rammelkamp for his careful and generous reading of Barbara Krasner’s powerful collection. It’s heartening to see these stories, so deeply engaged with history and survival, receiving the thoughtful critical attention they deserve.
Read the whole review here:
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