Overview
Haunted by her grandmother's Old World stories and larger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Her quest for truth gave tragic answers. Using 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. From her grandmother's village of Volchin in Belarus, she followed the trail of the death march taken by the village Jews to the place of their slaughter in 1942. During the same period, in Brona Gora forest some 50,000 Jews were shot. Simon was in one of the first American groups to visit this little-publicized site. 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 50 percent of their Jewish victims by means other than gassing. Thus Simon fills a significant gap in Holocaust history by providing the most extensive report yet 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 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.
Full Product Details
Author: Andrea Simon
Publisher: Vallentine Mitchell & Co Ltd
Imprint: Vallentine Mitchell & Co Ltd
Edition: 2nd New edition
ISBN: 9781912676156
ISBN 10: 191267615
Pages: 300
Publication Date: 04 September 2019
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Andrea Simon's astonishing Bashert ... tells not only the stories of what her research and interviews uncovered, but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- the story of her determined, compulsive journey to discover the truth about her extended family's past. Both those who perished and those who survived. --Philip K Jason, Washington Independent Review of Books
"""A fascinating, well-researched work, the author's book explores many unique facets of generational trauma, postwar genealogy, and historical and genealogical research. Simon's work also highlights the difficulty experienced by many Jewish families as they try to reconstruct their familial stories and immigration pathways."" --The US Review of Books. ""Andrea Simon's astonishing Bashert ... tells not only the stories of what her research and interviews uncovered, but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- the story of her determined, compulsive journey to discover the truth about her extended family's past. Both those who perished and those who survived."" --Philip K Jason, Washington Independent Review of Books"
Author Information
Andrea Simon is a writer, editor, and photographer who lives in New York City. For the past several years, she has devoted her efforts to fiction and literary nonfiction, including her memoir/history, Bashert: A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest, and her award-winning historical novel, Esfir Is Alive. Andrea has published numerous stories
