Overview

Despite decades of outstanding writing about the Holocaust, the full story of roughly a quarter million Jews who survived Nazi extermination in the Soviet interior, Central Asia, and the Middle East is nearly unknown, even to their descendants. Investigating her late father's mysterious identity as a ?Tehran Child,? literary scholar Mikhal Dekel delved deep into archives ?including Soviet files not previously available to Western scholars?on three continents. She pursued the path of these Holocaust refugees from remote Kolyma in Siberia to Tashkent in Uzbekistan and, with the help of an Iranian friend and colleague, to Tehran. It was there that her father, aunt, and nearly a thousand other Jewish refugee children survived the war. Dekel's part-memoir, part-history, part-literary-political reflection on fate, identity, and memory uncovers the lost story of Jewish refuge in Muslim lands, the complex global politics behind whether refugees live or die, and the collective identity-creation that determines the past we remember.

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Reviews

... a highly personal, journalistic memoir and a valuable addition to Holocaust history... What makes Dekel's study so valuable is not just its assiduous detailing of one family's fate during the second world war, but how it also makes us reflect on our current era, with its mass migrations of desperate people fleeing conflict and hardship only to meet inflamed nativism and the desire to shift responsibility for their fate from one country on to the next. -- The Guardian Tehran Children is the story of Dekel's quest to understand where her father came from [...] that speaks to the terrors of the twenty-first century. -- Times Literary Supplement ... intriguing story... -- The International New York Times Groundbreaking... The strength of Dekel's book is that it moves beyond the narrative binary of warm hospitality and abuse to show the grey spaces in between... it is hope that lies at the center of this moving, heartbreaking testimony... hope that unt -- Arash Azizi - Iran Wire Part-history, part second-generation memoir, Tehran Children sheds light on a previously neglected episode of the Holocaust. -- Jerusalem Report

"""... a highly personal, journalistic memoir and a valuable addition to Holocaust history... What makes Dekel’s study so valuable is not just its assiduous detailing of one family’s fate during the second world war, but how it also makes us reflect on our current era, with its mass migrations of desperate people fleeing conflict and hardship only to meet inflamed nativism and the desire to shift responsibility for their fate from one country on to the next."" -- The Guardian ""Tehran Children is the story of Dekel’s quest to understand where her father came from […] that speaks to the terrors of the twenty-first century."" -- Times Literary Supplement ""The story at the center of this book is the way contingency shaped so many destinies. It makes these Tehran children not simply another detail of the Holocaust but a matter of enduring existential, psychological and moral reflection."" -- Jonathan Brent - The New York Times Book Review ""... intriguing story…"" -- The International New York Times ""Groundbreaking... The strength of Dekel’s book is that it moves beyond the narrative binary of “warm hospitality” and “abuse” to show the grey spaces in between... it is hope that lies at the center of this moving, heartbreaking testimony... hope that untold suffering can, and sometimes does, come to an end."" -- Arash Azizi - Iran Wire ""Part-history, part second-generation memoir, Tehran Children sheds light on a previously neglected episode of the Holocaust."" -- Jerusalem Report ""... compelling and personal narrative...This book is an important part of Holocaust history. A tragic story, full of sadness and suffering yet also hope."" -- Methodist Recorder"

Author Information

Mikhal Dekel is professor of English at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. For this book, she was named a finalist for the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, and the Chautauqua Prize.

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