Ida Fink was born in 1921 in Zbarazh, a provincial town on the eastern edge of Poland (now Ukraine). In 1942, she escaped with her sister from the ghetto and hid until the end of the war. From 1957 until her death (2011) she lived in Israel. She began publishing only in 1971. She is the only author not writing in Hebrew to be awarded the Israel State Prize for Literature (2008). All of her laconic prose, completely devoid of both pathos and demonstrative depictions of cruelty, is associated with the theme of the Holocaust. The short stories collected in the book “The Floating Garden” in one way or another refer to the story that gave the name to the entire collection: the gap between the era before the Holocaust and the subsequent history of humanity and specific people.