Stephania

by Ilona Karmel

At some time in life most of us have been involved in the private world of a hospital. The setting of Stephania is a room in a Swedish hospital for the handicapped. It is the account of a critical year in the lives of three patients in Room Number Two and how they are changed by the hospital and by each other.

They are Stephania, a Polish refugee, bitterly determined to have a normal body after the disfigurement from a ghetto and concentration camp. Fröken Nilsson, the provincial spinster whose broken leg cannot bear the gross weight of her secret feedings. And gentle 16-year-old Thura, whose placid acceptance of infantile paralysis keeps her completely immobile.

Stephania is walled in by pride, arrogant in her determination to be cured and contemptuous of those who lack her bitter strength. No one dreamed that it would be she who would effect a positive physical change in the lives of Thura and Fröken Nilsson. And her own cure might be more in spirit than the body.

At the end of World War II, Ms. Karmel was hospitalized in Sweden for injuries received in a Nazi concentration camp of which she was one of the few survivors.

Genres: Fiction

375 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

Reviews

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quite remarkable book and deserves to be better known. I hope that a bit of exposure on Goodreads will encourage others to try it. It's the story of 3 women in a hospital room each with long-term problems. Sounds riveting? Well, no, I guess it doesn't - but believe me, it is! Very well written, with great empathy and understanding of the characters, and in many ways a page-turner. There are a few cheap copies on Amazon UK, so go on, give it a try!

[moira · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is surprisingly uneventful but there's something about the characters that holds your interest throughout the whole book. The relationship between these three women blossoms in the most beautiful way, as well as the characters' immaculate development.

[Robin]

The second Ilona Karmel book I just could not put down. She has a riveting way of describing her character's understandings of their unchanging surroundings, and the drama of how they change within them—and within their relationships with other women—strikes me as ahead of its time.