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Books: Living in Two Worlds
by Bonny V. Fetterman
In 1986, representatives of the Organization of Partisans, Underground Fighters and Ghetto Rebels in Israel approached Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec to write a historical account of the Bielski partisan unit—the single most massive rescue operation of Jews by Jews. The group offered to set up interviews with former partisans, including Tuvia Bielski, its charismatic leader, whom Tec met two weeks before his death in New York. The book, Defiance, was published in 1993 and became the basis for the 2008 film. Even for those who saw the film, reading Defiance is essential to understanding the extent of the Bielskis’ accomplishment. Tuvia, Asael, and Zus—three brothers from a family of ten—were large, strong, handsome men who grew up on a farm in Western Belorussia. They knew how to survive in the surrounding woods. When Germany invaded Russian-occupied Poland in 1941, they fled to the forests with a small group of friends and relatives instead of following orders to enter the ghettos. Soon they actively began to enlarge the camp: they sent guides into ghettos to help Jews escape and sent scouts to find fugitive Jews hiding in the forests. Tuvia, the commander, reportedly often said, ”Would that there were thousands of Jews who could reach our camp, we would take all of them in!” Unlike the Soviet partisan units, which only accepted men with weapons, the Bielski partisans accepted all Jews, including women, children, and older people. As one partisan recalls, “Tuvia was eager to accept into his unit as many Jewish fugitives as possible and he continued to implement this policy despite vigorous internal opposition.” Unlike the movie version—in which Tuvia and Zus quarrel over this issue and Zus leaves the camp to join a Russian fighting unit—the brothers in fact never separated, despite Zus’ real concerns over whether they would be able to feed them all. Tuvia showed brilliant leadership skills in organizing a functioning forest community that numbered 1,200 people by 1944. He negotiated deals with the Soviet partisans that enabled their camp to survive as a Jewish otriad (official partisan unit) with its own policies, though ostensibly under Soviet authority. The Bielski camp was organized mainly for defense and rescue, but at times had to contribute fighting men to Russian partisan units to join in acts of sabotage against the Germans. Nevertheless, when in 1943 the Nazis launched a massive invasion of the forests called “The Big Hunt,” the Russian units in the area fled and left the Jewish group to fend for itself. The Bielski brothers led their group across a 12-kilometer swamp to safety, taking care to leave no one behind and going back for stragglers. After the war, these modest men faded into oblivion (Asael died in the Red Army months before the war’s end), remembered mainly by those who knew them as true heroes.
Thomas Buergenthal, the American judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague, is a scholar in the post-Holocaust field of international law and human rights. He is also a child survivor of Nazi labor and concentration camps. Born in Czechoslavakia, the son of German and Polish Jews, five-year-old “Tommy” fled with his parents to Poland in 1939. When the ghetto at Kielce was liquidated in August 1942, he was the only child able to stay with his parents in the labor camp at Henryków. “What prompted the city commandant to spare my life on that morning has remained a mystery to me,” he writes. “Was it that I was blond and spoke fluent German and possibly reminded him of his own children? I shall never know.” This unusual memoir has a quiet and reflective tone, partly because he is still puzzling out his extraordinary luck. People are often shocked when he says he was lucky to get into the camp at Auschwitz, where he was sent in August 1944. He quickly explains that his group was spared the lethal selection process at the Birkenau rail platform because the SS officers probably assumed that, coming from a labor camp, there were no children in the transport. Buergenthal considers himself lucky because at every stage of his journey he found people who tried to protect him. In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, he befriended a Norwegian inmate named Odd Nansen, the subsequent founder of UNICEF. And upon liberation, a Polish division of the Soviet army adopted Tommy as their mascot and took him back to Poland, beginning the process by which he found his mother, who also survived. After the war, he and his mother settled in his mother’s former hometown of Göttingen, Germany. There Buergenthal recalls confronting the full force of his feelings: “As I contemplated scenes of happy Germans enjoying their lives as if nothing had happened in the recent past, I longed to have a machine gun mounted on the balcony so I could do to them what they had done to my family,” he recalls. “It took me a long time to get over these sentiments and to recognize that such indiscriminate acts of vengeance would not bring my father or grandparents back to life.” Buergenthal’s revealing self-portrait provides insight into a career devoted to the international defense of human rights.
Winner of a Sami Rohr Choice Award, Ilana Blumberg’s memoir explores the tensions, struggles, and dreams of a young Jewish woman trying to find her place within Judaism. Blumberg’s questions are particularly acute because they arise from an exceptional Jewish background. Both of her parents were educated in Jewish day schools and her father taught her to be a Torah reader. Her grandfather, Harry Blumberg, was the author of the classic Hebrew textbook Ivrit Hayah, Modern Hebrew. Though members of a Conservative congregation, her parents chose an Orthodox Jewish day school, the only day school in their community, for her to continue her Jewish studies through high school. Upon graduation, she enrolled for a year’s study at a woman’s seminary in Israel. There, she quickly discovered, the curriculum for men and boys at the yeshiva differed from the women’s studies at the seminary: the young men studied texts, while the program for young women seemed at best an afterthought. Though she remained religiously observant in college, she found that as a woman, her full participation in the Orthodox world was often blocked. At the same time, she was not willing to relinquish the joys of a religious life with other Hebrew-literate Jews. “My entire life I had been looking for a lover in Hebrew,” she writes. “This would be the way we would recognize each other.” Her story, though uniquely her own, mirrors the existential situation of many educated Jewish women in the 1980s and 90s confronting a social structure not yet ready to receive them as equals. The four autobiographical essays in this volume describe her love for texts, both Jewish and secular, and the two parallel worlds of her intellectual life. Blumberg went on to complete her doctorate in English literature and is currently a professor of English literature and Jewish studies at Michigan State University. She participates in a small minyan in her academic community.
Joshua Halberstam explains the genesis of this novel in his Acknowledgments: “Rummaging in the closet of my childhood home in Boro Park, I came upon a box filled with typewritten Chassidic stories. These were the tales my father wrote and read on the Yiddish radio station WEVD back in the 1950s and 1960s.” Savoring the insights in these tales, Halberstam set them into a novel about Chassidic families in Boro Park. Elisha, the seventeen-year-old son and grandson of Chassidic rebbes, longs to learn about the world outside of their community. When he declares his intention to enroll in City College, while promising to keep up with his yeshiva studies, his family is doubtful. Soon Elisha himself realizes that his attempt to live in two worlds—secular and religious—inevitably involves choices. Set in 1968—at the height of the Vietnamese war and campus rebellions—this novel depicts the inner struggle of a young man who is deeply attached to his family, history, and religion, and at the same time committed to his search for self. Elisha is thrilled on occasions when his two worlds converge—as when he discovers that Franz Kafka was interested in Chassidism and had visited his rabbinic grandfather several times in Prague. But more often Elisha finds that he is changing in ways that separate him from the Chassidic community, putting him on a direct collision course with his father. Steering clear of sentimentality and with a keen eye for humor, Halberstam tells a quintessential story of youth intent on finding its own way, while the parental generation learns how to guide while letting go—in this case, through the wisdom of Chassidic tales.
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Defiance by Nechama Tec 
A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal 
Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman Among Books by Ilana M. Blumberg 
A Seat at the Table: A Novel of Forbidden Choices by Joshua Halberstam 
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