In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust [Paperback]

A Finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Chautauqua Prize The story at the center of this book is the way contingency shaped so many destinies. It makes these Tehran children not simply another detail of the Holocaust but a matter of enduring existential, psychological and moral reflection. The backstory about how Dekel, now a professor of comparative literature in the U.S., began researching this project with an Iranian colleague, adds an interesting personal aspect to this work of excellent scholarship and a harrowing history illuminating both the specifics of the past and the universal aspects of the refugee experience. An engrossing narrative that seamlessly weaves together a moving memoir, a gripping detective novel, and an erudite social history; heart wrenching in describing the agonies of the Polish Jews, heartwarming in bringing to life their defiance and the hospitality they received in places like Tehran. While voices of rancor and rage are using stereotypes and shibboleths to simplify the complexities of our human condition, In this brilliantly conceived narrative, Mikhal Dekel illuminates a series of unexpected places absent from many maps of the refugee experience of the Holocaust. A striking book. A revelatory history, a saga of flight and welcome, of death and head-down survival, a powerful narrative built for this moment. Dekels sweeping storytelling is marked by heartbreaking restraint and historical sensitivity. Groundbreaking...The strength of Dekels book is that it moves beyond the narrative binary of warm hospitality and abuse to show the grey spaces in between...it is hope that lies at the center of this moving, heartbreaking testimony...hope that untold suffering can, and sometimes does, come to an end.