To All My Friends and Colleagues,
My new book: We Who Lived: Two Teenagers in World War II Poland has just
been published last January, 2018. It is a memoir of my own and my husband's
life as teenagers in German occupied Poland during the Holocaust years,
1939-1945. It is an authentic eye witness report and a story of danger,
resilience and hope. The book garnered many favorable comments, and will be
an asset to all libraries. I enclose a recent review by Rivka Levy, herself
an author. Read and remember.
A Book Review: We Who Lived:
I'm always a sucker for memoirs, and especially memoirs written about
experiences or periods of time that capture some of the essence of what it
meant to be a Jew at that time and in that place.
Hava Ben-Tzvi's memoir, called 'We Who Lived, Two Teenagers in World War II
Poland' packs a lot of poignant detail into some deceptively simple and
easy-to-read prose - I read the book in one sitting. The story begins in
Poland, transverses the horrors of World War II and the holocaust, and then
skips over to life in Israel, where Hava meets and marries her husband,
Ephraim.
Later, Ephraim and Hava are given the chance to study in the US, and even
though they intend to return to the holy land, it seems God had other plans.
Essentially, Hava and Ephraim were eye-witnesses, deep in the crucible of
suffering that would eventually lead to the birth of the State of Israel,
and as such, these memoirs are an invaluable snapshot of that time, and
those places.
I often find with a lot of holocaust memoirs that the material is written in
a very pared-back, almost spartan way, and the same is true of We Who Lived.
When you're dealing with first-hand accounts of such tremendous human drama
and suffering, that understated style seems to be the only way to convey
what needs to be said without overwhelming the reader, or the writer, with
too much detail and too much pain.
Often, these books understandably end up with a kind of distant feel to them
as a result, where you feel the writer is trying to reach across the chasm
that separates them from people who didn't experience what they went
through, but then discovers that words alone are still not alone to bridge
that gap.
This book also has a little of that 'distant' feel in parts - where I'd like
to have known more about Hava's life in the US, and more about the faces of
the dead she sees reflected in her very much alive grandchildren. But on the
whole, I think the writer has done a very good job of conveying a lot in a
little, understated way, leaving it to the reader's imagination to fill in
more of the details.
So, I highly recommend this book as a snapshot of life in Poland during
World War II and in the newly-created State of Israel, and I personally feel
that each one of these memoirs that makes it out into the world is a gem, in
its own way, that needs to be appreciated and found a place in the crown of
Jewish literature.
Hava's story is not just her own, it's the story of her people, the Jewish
people. And also, a reminder that every day of life God gives us is
something to be grateful for.
__
Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author
and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL)
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