3o6 Reviews on themain strands ofDrach's reception since 1988.However, by comparison with the previous section the final part makes somewhat flat reading: for instance, one misses an in-depth account of the court case Drach had to fight to get his house back, as well as a more detailed exploration of his years ofwork as a lawyer, the typeof cases he took on and the influence of his professional career on his notion of 'Protokollstir. But perhaps thiswill be addressed in a future publication. Schobel's biography deserves to be called ground-breaking: her well-written and well-researched book provides the reader with a fascinating introduction to one of themost complex figures of twentieth-centuryAustrian literature. It should be of equal interest to scholars of avant-garde Austrian writing, of Exile and Holocaust Studies, and ofJewish literature inGerman. University College Dublin Anne Fuchs Shards. By Stella Rotenberg, trans, by Donal McLaughlin and Stephen Richardson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review. 2003. 93 pp. ?5.99. isbn i 85933-216-1. Stella Rotenberg isan Austrian exile poet with a difference.Taking refuge inBritain in 1939 at the age of twenty-three,and a practising poet since that time,Rotenberg has been writing in German throughout her many years in England. However, none of her work was published until the 1960s,with her firstcollection appearing only in 1972, inTel Aviv. Further publications followed: Die wir ?brig sindwas pub lished inGermany in 1978, and in 1991, in her native Vienna, Scherbensind endlicher Hort, which is the source ofmost of the poems reproduced and translated in this new bilingual edition, Shards. Public honours and further publications, including a volume of prose, were not far behind: in 1996, Stella Rotenberg was awarded the Austrian Ehrenkreuz Erster Klasse f?r Kunst und Wissenschaft, in 2001 theTheodor Kramer Prize, and in 2002 an honorary doctorate fromHeriot-Watt University, Edinburgh (where Donal McLaughlin was a lecturer for a number of years). It is McLaughlin, one of the two translators of thisvolume, who deserves much of the credit forpublicizing Stella Rotenberg's work, both within an academic context and, through his translations, to a wider English-speaking readership. Prior to Heriot-Watt, McLaughlin was a member of theResearch Centre forGermans and Austrians inGreat Britain, then at theUniversity ofAberdeen; and itwas there in 1990 thathe and J.M. Ritchie invitedRotenberg, for the firsttime, to read publicly from her poetry. Since then, McLaughlin has continued to be an assiduous promoter ofRotenberg's work through lectures and translations. The poems making up Shards are divided into five sections and, as far as their subject matter is concerned, they are presented in a broadly chronological fashion: 'The Holocaust', 'The experience of exile', 'After thewar', 'Private lives' and 'All livingbeings'. The opening poem to the collection, 'Prolog' / 'Prologue', likemany of Rotenberg's poems, testifiesboth to the victims of the Holocaust and to the obligation to bear witness. In a Polish village fromwhich all theJewish inhabitants are to be deported, the rabbi entreats his coreligionists to record the event for posterity. Since none of them returns home, however, it is leftto the exiled poet ? even though she likewise fails to return home ? to serve as chronicler. The fate of Rotenberg's own mother, who perished in theHolocaust, is hauntingly recalled in AUSTRIAN STUDIES, 12, 2OO4 both the daughter's poetry and her prose, imprinting itself in thisvolume not only on the 'Holocaust' section but also on poems relating to later events, as in her deeply disquieting 'Auf Besuch inDeutschland nach dem Jahr 1945' / 'Visiting Germany after 1945', for instance: 'Zu wem spreche ich? | Wem folge ich trauend insHaus? | Welcher hat meine Mutter get?tet? | Sie sehen alle doch wie Menschen aus' [Who am I speaking to? |Which can I trust, | follow into their homes? | Which one killed my mother? |After all, | they all look human]. Almost all of these poems, no matter inwhich section they are grouped nor in which decade ofRotenberg's poetic production theywere composed, bear witness to intense sadness and loss.The loss of hermother runs hand inhand, thematically, with a further grave loss, that of her mother-tongue, as expressed in 'Klage um den Verlust der Mutterspache' / 'Lamenting the loss of...