Children of Zion

by Henryk Grynberg, Jacqueline Mitchell (Translator)

Overview

In Children of Zion, Henryk Grynberg takes an extraordinary collection of interviews conducted by representatives of the Polish government-in-exile in Palestine in 1943 and arranges them in such a way that their voices become unforgettable. The interviewees—all Polish children—tell of their wartime experiences. Rather than using traditional form, Grynberg has turned their voices into a large "choral" group. The children recall their lives before the war (most were well off), their memories of the war's outbreak and the arrival of the Germans and Russians, and their experiences after leaving work camps and the ways many coped with their lives as orphans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810113534
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	01/14/1998
Series:	Jewish Lives
Edition description:	Translated
Pages:	178
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

HENRYK GRYNBERG was born in Warsaw in 1936. He is known for his writings on the Jewish experience of World War II.

JACQUELINE MITCHELL, a translator, lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Preface
We Lived Pretty Well
When War Broke Out
Germans, Germans, Germans
Russians, Bolsheviks
The Longest Journey
We Worked
"Religious Criminals"
When the News of the Amnesty Came
We Knew We Were Dying
Orphans
List of Testimonies
Afterword

Editorial Reviews

"It is the unvarnished, artless, and naïve story of children who, to put it mildly, had no theory to defend." —Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, New Republic


"[A] powerful, relentless document that bears grim testimony to the suffering endured by the children and their families as they journeyed from horror to horror." —Library Journal

From the Publisher

In his preface, the author describes his book as a "documentary tale," an epic created by rewording the interview records of Jewish children evacuated from the Soviet Union to Palestine in 1943. Grynberg himself (The Victory, LJ 5/1/94) was a child survivor of the Holocaust who now lives in self-imposed exile in the United States. He has here selected and arranged 73 testimonies, not presenting each one as a separate entity but extracting from each certain common strands and collecting them in choral groups. Then, while not altering the content, Grynberg has sought to enhance the narrative by rewording the text in a way that allows it to flow more naturally. It begins with the children's life in Poland before the war, continues with the arrival of the Germans and the Russians, and concludes with the experience of exile. The result is a powerful, relentless document that bears grim testimony to the suffering endured by the children and their families as they journeyed from horror to horror. This is a bleak, cumulative tale of brutality, humiliation, and misery told in the straightforward language of children who have no need to embellish the truth, but whose stories cry out to be heard. Recommended without reservation for public and academic collections.Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y.

Library Journal