Bashert
Subtitle: A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: September 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781578064816
Subjects: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Persecutions; History: World; Jewish Holocaust Personal Narratives; Race And Ethnic Relations; History; History - General History; Jews; Holocaust; Eastern Europe - General; Personal Memoirs; Valozhyn; Discrimination & Racism; Valozhyn (Belarus); Belarus; Volchin
First sentence: Frigid blasts seem to belch from New Jersey smokestacks, catapult like cannonballs across the Hudson, gathering momentum through the narrow branches of barren linden trees, and burst through my poorly sealed Riverside Drive windows.
Description: "Haunted by her grandmother's Old World stories and bigger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Her sojourn, a quest for truth, gave her tragic answers.".

"On a group tour of ancestral Jewish homeland sites that had been crushed in the Holocaust, she made a riveting detour to her grandmother's village of Volchin, in what is now Belarus, where the last known family members had lived. There, she followed the trail of the death march taken by the village Jews to the place of their slaughter by Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the fall of 1942. During the same period, in Brona Gora, a forest between Brest and Minsk, some 50,000 Jews were shot.

Simon was in one of the first American groups to visit this little-publicized site." "Bashert, the Yiddish word for fate, guided her through the arduous quest. With newly translated archival records, she peeled back layers of clues to confront the mystery. This story of her momentous odyssey reveals the terrible fate of her kin."--BOOK JACKET.