Seeing the World Through Books

This memorable depiction of the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by the brutal Stalinists in 1939, with their bloodshed and violence, is filled with trenchant observations of real people behaving realistically during times of real crisis. In clear, unadorned prose, author Theodore Odrach depicts the lives of rural peasants with sensitivity and an awareness both of their independence and of their shared values, contrasting them with the mindless, bureaucratic officials who enjoy wielding power over human beings who have become mere ciphers to them. A sense of dark humor and irony, which may be the only thing that makes survival possible, distinguishes this novel from other novels of this period, and no reader will doubt that this book is written by a someone who has seen the atrocities unfold, experienced the injustices, empathized with his fellow citizens, and felt compelled to tell the world about the abuses.

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When the Germans finally retreated from Belarus in the summer of 1944, almost twelve hundred Jewish survivors of the Holocaust shocked the world by materializing from the forest where they had lived in hiding during the German occupation. Some of these survivors had lived in the forest for more than three years, part of a community established by Tuvia, Asael, and Zus Bielski, three brothers who had chosen to take their chances on survival in the forest rather than submit to the Nazis and their many collaborators. Author Peter Duffy places this extraordinary story of survival in context by describing the Bielskis’ lives and experiences, quoting from Tuvia Bielski’s previously unknown journal, and revealing the sociopolitical history, including the anti-Semitism, of Belarus, a region south of Lithuania.

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