Melvin Jules Bukiet; short story cycle; initiation; Jewish identity; shtetl; child; imagination; Holocaust

In his short story cycle Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992), Melvin Jules Bukiet describes the vanished world of the shtetl Proszowice - his father's home town - with its rituals, superstitions and hopes. The stories are set in the period preceding the wartime cataclysm, seen from the perspective of a nameless Jewish child, and the narrative is inevitably shaped by the course of the devastating events that were to follow. Although the narrator's childhood is imaginary, its evocation is not solely based on fantasy; it draws on Bukiet's deep knowledge of Jewish history in Europe and the Jewish literary heritage.