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Bashert: A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography) Author: Andrea Simon $35.00 |
Bashert: A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography) |
Editorial Review:
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 makes 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.
Mass shootings of Jews, particularly in the Soviet Union, have not been addressed with the same focus given to concentration-camp atrocities. Yet Simon's research reveals that Nazis killed nearly fifty percent of their Jewish victims by means other than gassing. In the historiography of the era, comparatively scant reference is made to the executions at Brona Gora. Thus Simon fills a significant gap in Holocaust history by providing the most extensive report yet given on the executions at Brona Gora and Volchin.
As she interweaves tragic narrative with evocative family anecdotes, Simon writes a story of life in czarist Russia and, within this frame, of her family's flight from pogroms and persecution. From a unique vantage Simon's memoir discloses her dogged genealogical search, the newly perceived Jewish history she uncovered, and the ramifications of the Holocaust in the postwar generation.
Andrea Simon is a freelance writer and photographer in New York City. She has been published in Mondo Greco, Sanibel Captiva Review, The Acorn, Fine Print, Arizona Jewish Post, and two anthologies.
Visit the author's website, http://www.andreasimon.net/
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0 
Moving account of the Holocaust:
I bought this book because a friend of mine on met the author on the train while my friend was making a pilgrimage of her own to revisit her past. My friend is mentioned in the book,along with her daughter who accompanied her on this trip. This book gives great insight from the victims perspective.
From a Non-Jew:
I can't imagine many non-Jews looking at Andrea Simon's book in a catalogue or a store and thinking they MUST have it, or that it would necessarily contain anything of value to them. After all, it's just a Jewish woman's search for her history, right? Wrong! It is a tender, and unsettling, story of a personal journey that turns historic. And it is a reminder of what can happen, and has happened, when we lose touch with our shared humanity. This is not an easy book to read but it is a compelling book- and it...more info
Personal and Universal:
Bashert is not easy reading. The author doesn't back away from painful discoveries or stand aloof emotionally: Andrea Simon is present on every page of her powerful and personal odyssey of discovery. In this book you get to know her, her family, their community, and their terrifying history. This book contains horrors and heroism. It is an important book for Jews and non-Jews alike. The inhumanities it chronicles remind us of why we must continue to stand against contemporay atrocities. Read this book....more info
An outstanding memoir:
This is one of the best holocaust memoirs I've ever read. Simon's account of the atrocities that were inflicted are woven through the horrific experiences that her own family suffered -- experiences that she learns on many steps of her journey. Beautifully written, expertly researched and told.
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