Powell's Books - The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck:
The parable-like novella "The Old Child" describes a girl's mind as seemingly blank: picked up off the street with no discoverable past, she is taken to a children's home where she discovers she can "succeed by her silence".
In the title story, a 75-page novella, an adolescent-looking female amnesiac is taken off the streets and into a Dresden home for children. As the story unfolds, there are signs that the girl, a metaphorical East Germany huh, may not be so young after all, and that her attempts to freeze herself in time, and to forget, are failing.

Boldtype | December 2005 - Issue Twenty-Six
The Berlin Wall fell more than fifteen years ago now, but the shock accompanying the sudden reunification that followed has gone largely unexplored in fiction. Enter Jenny Erpenbeck, who grew up in East Berlin and wrote the title story of her strange and haunting The Old Child & Other Stories in the city after the collapse of the old order.
The old child, a large, slow, doughy girl, surfaces on the street, clutching a bucket and claiming not to remember her name or her history. Placed in an orphanage, the girl finds comfort in silence, despite the indignities to which her contemporaries subject her: spitting in her food, ripping her underwear from her body. Still, she fails to repress her past completely. It bubbles up in unwelcome memories and secret correspondence*, materializing finally on her face itself during a protracted illness.**

*Letters she writes: TO ME
YOU ARE DEAD TO ME. BEST WISHES, YOUR MAMA.
and mails by ~ pushing through slot into old crate in yard of the childrens home

**p74: Thanks to the strict diet, something happens that no one would have thought possible: the girl becomes thin. All over her body, the now superfluous skin begins to droop in folds, and her face takes shape in a monstrous way: It is becoming the face of an adult.
The doctors in the children's ward are the first to notice.
az-The Old Child & Other Stories

Interview - PEN translation grant

Washington Post review - WashingtonPost - Found in Translation:
It is in "The Old Child," however, that Erpenbeck most completely illustrates the raw potential and power of the parental body. Discovered on a street carrying an empty bucket, a 14-year-old girl remembers nothing of her name or past; she is taken by authorities to an orphanage, where she struggles to adjust her blockish, strangely uncooperative body to her surroundings and to the other children. With its contorted ending, "The Old Child" straddles parable and realistic narrative to ask, precariously: What happens to a child's identity when there has been no cradle in which to form it? Erpenbeck does not necessarily see a happily re-written ending for those who lose their way on the long path between birth and death. Read these sharp stories if you can get to only one of these books recommending this foremost of the books here reviewed?, but be forewarned: Erpenbeck will get under your skin.

Critical Compendium » The Book of Words, by Jenny Erpenbeck
The protagonist of Erpenbeck’s novella “The Book of Words” is also an unnamed girl for whom the world is a perplexing and unbearable place where everything seems in flux and the facade of civilization is eroding.