Children of Zion (Jewish Lives)
In his preface, the author describes his book as a "documentary tale," an epic created by rewording the interview records of Jewish children evacuated from the Soviet Union to Palestine in 1943. Grynberg himself (The Victory, LJ 5/1/94) was a child survivor of the Holocaust who now lives in self-imposed exile in the United States. He has here selected and arranged 73 testimonies, not presenting each one as a separate entity but extracting from each certain common strands and collecting them in choral groups. Then, while not altering the content, Grynberg has sought to enhance the narrative by rewording the text in a way that allows it to flow more naturally. It begins with the children's life in Poland before the war, continues with the arrival of the Germans and the Russians, and concludes with the experience of exile. The result is a powerful, relentless document that bears grim testimony to the suffering endured by the children and their families as they journeyed from horror to horror. This is a bleak, cumulative tale of brutality, humiliation, and misery told in the straightforward language of children who have no need to embellish the truth, but whose stories cry out to be heard. Recommended without reservation for public and academic collections.?Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.