Novelization of the Lodz Ghetto II

This will continue and complete the observations I made on October 30,  concerning the novel EMPEROR OF LIES by Sem-Sandburg.

There's a nice touch near the end, as the novelist wants to inform us that the Russian front is getting closer to Lodz. He writes, "Rosa Smolenska could feel the detonations of distantly falling bombs, dull tremors through the walls of the house and up through her own body."

I like that because it seems to be paradoxical, and because in its paradoxical way it states the precise nature of these detonbations as felt by the ghetto inhabitants. They are still "distant" and "dull," yet not so distant nor so dull that they fail to pass as a tremor through one's whole body.

Just a bit later, we get what some might call unnecessary detail about the sort of war related manufacture still taking place in the ghetto.  "Debora worked right at the end of the cold, crowded shed, where she and some other girls stood packing the finished fuses in little square boxes made of card." "Card" sounds like an awkward translation that might better have been "cardboard," but the detail work continues in the next sentence. "Twelve plugs to a box, and then the flaps and the top and bottom of the boxes had rto be tucked into the little diagonal slots on their sides."