The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir
The author's Orthodox Jewish family lived in Radom, Poland, where, in 1939, a third of the city's 85,000 inhabitants were Jews. Gold points out that thousands of books have been written about the Holocaust, but only a few have depicted the lives of Polish Jews before they were murdered. He posits that they left us a rich legacy in religious and secular literature, in Hasidic and klezmer music, in Yiddish folk songs, and in art. This memoir describes the traditional life of Gold's family and the community in which he grew up. The first 16 chapters cover the period between 1927, when the author was four, and 1940, when the Germans put the family in a ghetto. He also chronicles his escape from a convoy on the way to the Dachau concentration camp and how he reconstructed his life after six years in ghettos and camps. He writes about, among other things, the relations between Poles and religious Jews as "burdened by prejudices on both sides."George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved