A description of a marketplace is placed at the end of Abba Kovner’s story of Cherna in “Scrolls of Testimony”.
While the Ukrainian woman was deciding between a white or red necklace, Cherna was forced to remove her clothing and falsely given the option between life and death. The marketplace can then be seen as a symbolic place where those inside live unaware of the horrors going on outside. This ‘marketplace’ can exist at any time where people live their lives ignorant of the struggles around them.
The deeper use of a marketplace is not unique to Abba Kovner. Ida Fink uses the marketplace in “A Scrap of Time” as an unchanging reference in contrast to time and the Jewish experience. The marketplace, described as old and weathered from time, remains the same even though the dynamic inside was very different than a normal market day.
The marketplace itself remains unchanged but is used to highlight the changing experience of the Jews: from shopping to being gathered for murder.
From the opening of “A Scrap of Time”, Ida Fink describes her inability to discuss a time from her past, but says it was not governed by the normal rules of time.
Under the assumption that this period of time was incredibly traumatic, typical of most Holocaust testimonies, it is likely that Fink was unable to fully register her emotions and the environment in which she survived. When recounting the traumatic experience, Fink views her experience during the Holocaust as though it occurred during a different time. The extreme inhumanity she experienced was enough for her to dissociate the traumatic time period from conventional time, thus creating a new version of time not measured in months and years. This eventually allowed Fink to more accurately conceptualize and recount her testimony. Additionally, the use of an altered perception of time functions as a literary tool to 2deepen the reader’s understanding of the emotional trauma and the inhuman world that was experienced by millions during Holocaust. Fink does this by focusing attention on the actual human experience in absence of other knowledge about the time period.  
The evolution of piyut takes on its own literary significance under close examination. The first step of its evolution takes place during his father’s youth on a trip with Abba Kovner’s great- grandfather. On their trip to Poland, the grandfather was ordered to sing a piyut outside of its religious purpose. This transformed the piyut into a symbol of Jewish struggles.
Abba Kovner then experienced the piyut’s transformation into a mark of humiliation due to his inability to sing. Kovner’s experience with piyut expanded beyond personal humiliation, and into a love of sorts. As an artist, he took careful note of the ornamental letters in the mahzor and fell in love with it.
This final transformation of piyut into a language that allows communication across life and death finalizes itself as a lamentation.
