Fragments by Greg Dinner

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In a story that takes the reader from the Russian Pale of Settlement in the 1890s to the frozen fields of Poland in WWII, from Bosnia to Jerusalem to Krakow in present days, and finally to the Ukraine border in 2022, as exhausted refugees seek shelter from the storm of a war neither sought nor wanted, FRAGMENTS is a novel of hope and redemption…

In an 1890s shtetl, in the Russian Pale of Settlement, a young man dreams that music from his violin might warm the heart of a tavern owner’s daughter, only to encounter life’s tragedy, and life’s journey.

In 1942 a patient at the Krakow Babinski Mental Home remembers the boy who loved her, and the old man who spoke kindnesses. She alone survives by embracing memory and finding hope.

In 1943 a young man traveling the secret frozen paths with his father and brother is determined to save a young woman escaping from the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to hold onto her name. To remember her story.

In the present, a well-known American war photographer of thirty years, struggling with PTSD, and an English forensic archaeologist digging at the foundations of a former Polish concentration camp, haunted by personal ghosts and the ghosts of the Holocaust, seek understanding in loss, find meaning in one another.

Tying these disparate generations is a broken violin called ‘Memory’–real and imagined fragments of experience that bring hope and salvation in word, in images, in music: from the past to the present to our joined future.

Referencing characters and some true events both from the sister novel A REQUIEM FOR HANIA as well as stories lived today, FRAGMENTS continues a journey of meaning, a search for self, a fundamental exploration of human experience through that which is lost, and that which is found.

…What remains is the photograph. The story without words, where words are not needed.
What remains is that point of time, the spots of time past, present and in many ways future.
What remains is memory. Memory of what we are, of our humanity, of our failings, of our weaknesses, of our hopes, of our dreams, of our frailty, of us.
We are remembered. We are the photograph.

The book’s page on the author’s site: gregdinner.com/fragments

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