It is a story of haunting innocence and terrible devastation, of lost love, of survival. It has an impact we have not felt since The Diary of Anne Frank and John Hersey's The Wall.In pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, Helene Richter's childhood glows with an idyllic richness and grace. Summers are spent in grandfather's great house on Prague Street, tranquil, shimmering days, strung together like shining jewels. Until the war. As the half-Jewish Helene reaches adolescence, her serene existence becomes a holocaust of disintegration and death. Her uncles, aunts, cousins are gone – to a place called Theresienstadt, from which they send postcards once a month with the same message: we are well we are healthy thinking of you how are you. As the war comes inexorably closer to her German father and her Jewish mother, Helene falls in love. But the war will close in on that love too...

    

    Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa.This revised edition makes Finnegan’s ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language” and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa.This volume is complemented by original recordings of stories and songs from the Limba country (Sierra Leone), collected by Finnegan during her fieldwork in the late 1960s, which are freely accessible here.The book is available as a free pdf and ebook download thanks to the generous support of interested readers and organisations, who made donations using the crowd-funding website unglue.it.Oral Literature in Africa is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.