{"id":73974,"date":"2019-10-22T17:05:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T15:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73974"},"modified":"2019-10-15T16:41:57","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T14:41:57","slug":"22-05-46","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=73974","title":{"rendered":"From Poland To The USSR To Iran To Israel: A Holocaust Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>From Poland To The USSR To Iran To Israel: A Holocaust Story<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Julia M. Klein<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Mikhal Dekel<\/em><\/p>\n

W.W. Norton & Company, 417 pages, $27.95<\/em><\/p>\n

It was the prompting of an Iranian-American colleague at the City College of New York that stirred Mikhal Dekel\u2019s interest in her family\u2019s Holocaust narrative of flight, hardship and survival.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dekel\u2019s initial idea was to collaborate on a book with Salar Abdoh, a fellow English professor who had left Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He returned there to help with research, since Dekel, as an Israeli citizen, was barred from the country. But the joint project proved unwieldy, and it collapsed as the friendship, beset by political differences, grew tense and distant.<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0\u201cTehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey<\/strong><\/span>,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the two academics\u2019 shifting relationship provides a metaphor for charged encounters among various peoples \u2013 Polish Jews, Polish Catholics, Russians, Uzbeks, Iranians and others \u2014 under wartime stress. The fruit of a decade of archival research, extensive travel, and interviews with family and strangers, the book is a major achievement and an important addition to the literature of the Holocaust.<\/span><\/p>\n

In tracing her family\u2019s journey, Dekel chronicles the relatively little-known tale of the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews (as well as other Poles) who fled east, to Soviet-occupied territories or the Soviet Union, after the Sept. 1, 1939 German invasion of Poland. Theirs was \u201ca story of being vomited out from the tentative safety of home into a vast, impoverished, ferociously dangerous world,\u201d she writes. With considerable imaginative empathy, Dekel embeds a gripping memoir and travelogue in a wide-angled history of wartime migrations and privations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rejecting the binary of victim and perpetrator, Dekel finds complexity in relationships shaped by changing material conditions as well as prejudice. Encountering a succession of guides, hosts and witnesses, reliable and less so, she explores the lingering traces \u2014 and denial \u2014 of the past in the present. And she ponders the role of contingency in determining destiny, the notion of \u201clife as fundamentally ironic, human agency as largely futile.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Norton<\/strong> \/ A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey: \u201cTehran Children,\u201d by Mikhal Dekel<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The book begins slowly as Dekel explains its origins and rationale, then pauses to thumbnail Iran\u2019s evolving attitudes toward Jews. But the narrative momentum increases as her family \u2013 and, decades later, Dekel herself \u2013 begins hurtling from country to country.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although about 250,000 of the 350,000 Polish Jews who survived the war did so in the Soviet Union, their fate has been something of a historical black hole. The opening of Russian, Polish and Central Asian archives, a spur to much recent Holocaust research, has been integral to revealing details of those harrowing years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Until she began this project, Dekel says she knew remarkably little of her family\u2019s journey and thought of herself, like many Israelis, as \u201ca child without a painful Jewish past.\u201d \u201cTehran Children\u201d is dedicated to her father, Hannan, an emotionally remote man who may have died from the after-effects of his wartime ordeal, and to his sister, who served as a key source for the book.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dekel\u2019s paternal relatives, the Teitel family (as they were then called), were the prosperous owners of a brewery in Ostr\u00f3w Mazowiecka, Poland, a predominantly Jewish town of about 10,000 where they had lived for generations. But just five days after the Nazi invasion, Dekel\u2019s paternal grandparents, father, paternal aunt Regina (later known as Rivka) and cousin Emma (Noemi) gathered their possessions and headed east. Visiting their onetime home decades later, Dekel finds \u201cno collision between the town\u2019s Jewish and Catholic pasts \u2026 no haunting, only plain, uncontested erasure.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Allied to Nazi Germany in the war\u2019s early months, the Soviet Union didn\u2019t exactly welcome Polish refugees. In waves of deportations, it arrested them in the middle of the night and stuffed them onto trains akin to the Nazi cattle cars. Jews and non-Jews alike were sent either to gulags in Siberia or (in Dekel\u2019s family\u2019s case) slightly less restrictive \u201cspecial settlements\u201d in other remote, underpopulated areas. Thousands died from a combination of punishing work regimens, extreme cold, starvation rations and disease, consigned to what Dekel calls \u201cone gigantic, unmarked burial ground\u2026.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the summer of 1941, when the Soviet Union and Poland switched from being enemies to allies, about 300,000 Polish citizens in Soviet territory were supposed to be released from captivity. Not all were, but many, including Dekel\u2019s family, made their way to one of the five Soviet Muslim republics in Central Asia.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though some received help from residents, they continued to be plagued by hunger, inadequate shelter and disease. During her own stay in Uzbekistan, Dekel is warmed by \u201ca culture of hospitality and compassion,\u201d but, having relaxed her guard, gets violently sick from drinking tainted water. Abdoh, her Muslim colleague and travel companion, helps care for her.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1942, about 116,000 Poles, both civilian and military, were evacuated by the Polish Army to Iran, among them about 6,000 Jews \u2013 including Hannan, Regina and Emma. At first, they were welcomed by Iranians and assisted by the country\u2019s established Jewish community. But non-Jewish Poles received better accommodations and more aid, Dekel discovers, and the relationship between Jews and other Poles deteriorated. Food shortages, blamed on the refugees, aroused Iranian hostility as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

With international Jewish help, more than 800 of the so-called Tehran Children finally immigrated to Palestine in 1943. Because Iraq refused transit visas, a short trip turned into a long, circuitous sea journey via India. On arrival, the children were assigned mostly to the care of kibbutzim or the religious Zionist Mizrahi Party, with Dekel\u2019s relatives ending up at Kibbutz Ein Harod. Years later, Hannan\u2019s mother was able to rejoin him in Israel, where the tenderness of their bond stoked Dekel\u2019s childhood jealousy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dekel writes that it was a near-impossible task to unearth her family\u2019s story, to \u201cretrieve it whole across the bar of seven decades of silence\u2026.\u201d \u201cTehran Children\u201d is a yeoman accomplishment, a skillfully wrought bridge between past and present that raises critical questions about both.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Julia M. Klein<\/strong>, the Forward\u2019s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle\u2019s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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From Poland To The USSR To Iran To Israel: A Holocaust Story Julia M. Klein Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey By Mikhal Dekel W.W. Norton & Company, 417 pages, $27.95 It was the prompting of an Iranian-American colleague at the City College of New York that stirred Mikhal Dekel\u2019s interest in her family\u2019s Holocaust […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73974"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73979,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73974\/revisions\/73979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}