FORMER LONDONER WRITES WARTIME MEMOIR Toronto octogenarian Kitty Wintrob has written a memoir of her experiences as a Jewish child being evacuated from the East End of London to the British countryside at the start of World War Two.
Titled I'm Not Going Back: Wartime Memoir of a Child Evacuee, the 176-page book tells the story of Wintrob's experiences as a ten-year-old Jewish girl who was evacuated to a cold foster home in the country, and who sneaks back to London and refuses to leave her mother's side even as German bombs start to fall. The book has significant Jewish content as Kitty describes, for example, the dilemma of being served a ham sandwich in her foster household and of her temporary foster parents clandestinely inspecting her head for signs of horns. The book is written for young people but most of Kitty's readers have been adults. When Kitty enrolled in a creative writing workshop more than 20 years ago, she never dreamed she would end up writing a full-length memoir. Encouraged by the enthusiastic praise from the instructor and students, she enrolled in one workshop after another for more than a decade until her memoir was finished. A school secretary in postwar London, Kitty moved to Canada for two years in the late 1950s and worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She married Ralph Wintrob, a young CBC news writer in Toronto, in 1959. "I'm Not Going Back: Wartime Memoir of a Child Evacuee" was published by Now and Then Books, and costs $18 (US/Canada). The publisher's website is nowandthenbookstoronto.com * * * --- Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [email protected] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
