Bashert: A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest

by Andrea Simon

Overview

Haunted by her grandmother's Old World stories and bigger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Her sojourn, a quest for truth, gave her tragic answers.

On a group tour of ancestral Jewish homeland sites that had been crushed in the Holocaust, she makes a riveting detour to her grandmother's village of Volchin, in what is now Belarus, where the last known family members had lived. There, she followed the trail of the death march taken by the village Jews to the place of their slaughter by Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the fall of 1942. During the same period, in Brona Gora, a forest between Brest and Minsk, some 50,000 Jews were shot. Simon was in one of the first American groups to visit this little-publicized site.

Bashert, the Yiddish word for fate, guided her through the arduous quest. With newly translated archival records, she peeled back layers of clues to confront the mystery. This story of her momentous odyssey reveals the terrible fate of her kin.

Mass shootings of Jews, particularly in the Soviet Union, have not been addressed with the same focus given to concentration-camp atrocities. Yet Simon's research reveals that Nazis killed nearly fifty percent of their Jewish victims by means other than gassing. In the historiography of the era, comparatively scant reference is made to the executions at Brona Gora. Thus Simon fills a significant gap in Holocaust history by providing the most extensive report yet given on the executions at Brona Gora and Volchin.

As she interweaves tragic narrative with evocative family anecdotes, Simon writes a story of life in czarist Russia and, within this frame, of her family's flight from pogroms and persecution. From a unique vantage Simon's memoir discloses her dogged genealogical search, the newly perceived Jewish history she uncovered, and the ramifications of the Holocaust in the postwar generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628467475
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	10/20/2009
Series:	Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Andrea Simon is a freelance writer and photographer in New York City. She has been published in Mondo Greco, Sanibel Captiva Review, The Acorn, Fine Print, Arizona Jewish Post, and two anthologies. Her photography work has been featured in international publications and galleries.

She is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the winner of the Ernest Hemingway First Novel Contest, two Dortort Creative Writing Awards, the Stark Short Fiction Prize, the Short Story Society Award, and the Authors in the Park Short Story Writing Contest.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, where she has taught writing.

Visit the author's website: http://www.andreasimon.net/

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
A Note about the Text
Foreword
Prologue
1. Bashert
2. Protest
3. Connection
4. Disappearance
5. Longing
6. Collaboration
7. Isolation
8. Annihilation
9. Response
10. Atonement
11. Survival
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Self-discovery meets history in this debut memoir. Like many Jews of the post-Holocaust generation, the author grew up listening to stories of family members murdered or disappeared. These reminiscences by those lucky enough to get away mingled fact with error, data with folklore, and when Simon began to look into them more closely, she found that the official record was no better, riddled as it was with omissions, distortions, gaps, and outright lies. Seeking on-the-ground truth, she begins with an account of a tour-group trip to the ruins of death camps and shtetls, her fellow travelers similarly seeking evidence that places like Volchin and Visoke actually existed outside the realm of storytelling. Much of Simon's subsequent narrative centers on her search through archives, interviews, and scholarly literature to discover what might have happened to those long-lost family members who disappeared during the Holocaust. Some, she learns, may have ended their days in places such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, but many Jews, especially in the Ukraine and Belarus, were shot and buried in anonymous mass graves, and postwar Soviet authorities were not eager to determine the victims' identities. Simon's tale begins hesitantly but gathers force as her sense of indignation grows with every obstacle present-day authorities put in her way. "I'm beginning to understand why some people still believe that the Holocaust never happened," she confesses in exasperation. "If history books, tourist guides, and government-sponsored investigative reports show scant or no reference to an entire race of people, then it's safe to deny their presence." Marred only by too-frequent passages on the self-indulgent orderof, "What began as a search for missing facts, for missing relatives, ultimately became a search for myself," her narrative is in the main lucid and thoughtful. Decidedly minor work in the larger literature of the Holocaust, but a useful complement to such recent works as John Garrard's The Bones of Berdichev (1996) and Eva Hoffman's Shtetl (1997).

Kirkus Reviews

"Andrea Simon’s astonishing Bashert ... tells not only the stories of what her research and interviews uncovered, but also — and perhaps more importantly — the story of her determined, compulsive journey to discover the truth about her extended family’s past. Both those who perished and those who survived." —Philip K Jason, Washington Independent Review of Books 

"A fascinating, well-researched work, the author’s book explores many unique facets of generational trauma, postwar genealogy, and historical and genealogical research. Simon’s work also highlights the difficulty experienced by many Jewish families as they try to reconstruct their familial stories and immigration pathways." —The US Review of Books.

From the Publisher