In their introduction to a 2001 volume of essays about the contemporary Jewish novelist Jakov Lind, Andrea Hammel and Edward Timms claimed that "few authors exemplify the phenomenon of writing after the bestialities of the Nazi regime more vividly" than Lind. Virtually all of Lind's writings are permeated with perspectives of the Holocaust, despite the fact that only a few of his literary works treat the Holocaust directly, such as the title story of Lind's first short-story collection, Eine Seele aus Holz (1962; translated as Soul of Wood, 1964), which earned him literary acclaim and was translated into fourteen languages. However, in general, Lind's writings tend to incorporate the Holocaust as an ineluctable background, an indelible memory, or as a peripheral matter that invariably interjects itself into the present of his narrative.

Lind shifted to English after his first works, all written in German, had begun to secure a devoted audience...