Lauren Grodstein

Heartbreaking account of the Jewish people in Poland who were forced from their homes to move to the Warsaw ghetto. During this time, Adam Paskow, a widower, is asked to take testimony from people to preserve the experience of living in the ghetto for history to remember them. He agrees, and he takes interviews of his young students to whom he is teaching English.
When he is moved to the ghetto, he is put in an apartment with two families. One of the mothers in the apartment, Sala, and Adam become friendly and fall in love. Adam desperately misses his deceased wife, who was Catholic, but takes comfort in Sala's arms.
As Adam attempts to escape the ghetto, he has to make a heart-wrenching decision on who to save. This is a book that will stay with me a long time. It is based on true events and was inspired by a true project.… (mais)

Outstanding novel about living in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII. The everydayness amidst the horror of people crowded together starving, being shot for no reason, dead bodies left on sidewalks is heart-rending.

For Adam Paskow, English teacher and widower, living with other families in a small apartment is the 'new normal.' He is asked to keep a journal of the daily lives of those around him for the Oneg Shabbat archive project.

For whatever reason, I'm thinking, this is going to be boring but no, Grodstein creates a novel with a plot, and dialog, that is anything but boring. It is frightening, fragile, strong, grotesque, beautiful; filled with pain, anguish, anger, but most of all love.

A book to read, to keep and cherish.… (mais)

Based on all the books I've read about WWI and WWII, there were apparently no boundaries to the cruelties inflicted by the Nazis. This book takes place in 1941and 1942 inside the Warsaw ghetto and is told in the first person by Adam Paskow, a Polish teacher and widower.

Adam is a 42-year-old living in a one-bedroom apartment with two families, previously strangers, so they number in 10 tight quarters. Conditions are harsh and food is scare for everyone living in the ghetto under the watchful, cruel eyes of the German police. He does his best to teach any interested children in a makeshift room, and also works for one of the Jewish agencies serving in a soup kitchen. He agrees to interview people in the ghetto about their lives both before and after the war.

This book is well researched and tells the truly heartbreaking stories of Jewish people confined to the ghetto, many of whom were deported to concentration camps. Those who remained were subjected to heartless treatment by Germans. The telling of the stories is difficult to read, but we must in order to honor those who survived and those who perished.… (mais)