In the summer season of 2019, bestselling creator Lauren Grodstein (A Friend of the Family) visited the Oneg Shabbat Archive in Poland, which homes diary entries and information documenting Jewish life beneath German occupation throughout World War II. As she learn testimonies and mirrored upon her circle of relatives’s departure from Poland, Grodstein discovered inspiration for her subsequent novel, a stirring work of historic fiction that takes readers into the Nazis’ largest ghetto.
We Must Not Think of Ourselves tells the story of Adam Paskow, who’s recruited by the Oneg Shabbat simply months after being relocated to a shared condo in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto. Emanuel Ringelblum, the group’s chief, explains to Adam that his project is to report “all the details, even if they seem insignificant. I don’t want you to decide what’s significant. . . . Our task is to pay attention. To listen to the stories.”
So Adam begins to conduct interviews along with his flatmates in addition to with youngsters from the English class he teaches. Acting as one thing of a Greek refrain, these voices vacillate between the mundane, the macabre and occasional moments of pleasure, demonstrating how the group doggedly clings to any semblance of normalcy. We come to see that, for Adam and all of the Jews stripped of their rights and freedoms, it’s an act of resistance to easily persist within the enterprise of day by day dwelling and proceed to take pleasure in easy pleasures wherever they might be discovered.
Adam additionally transcribes his personal life story, musing not solely on his more and more bleak current actuality but additionally his life earlier than the struggle, when he labored at a prestigious faculty and was fortunately married till his spouse’s tragic loss of life. Though he believes the nice love of his life is behind him, we witness Adam slowly kind a romantic reference to Sala, a married mom with whom he now shares cramped dwelling quarters. Their mutual attachment transforms their time within the ghetto into one thing greater than survival.
As its plot advances, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is most involved with exploring the inner lives of its characters and giving faces to the individuals who lived within the Warsaw Ghetto. By retaining the novel’s scope intimate and private, Grodstein lets readers expertise Adam and his compatriots’ loss and resilience in a visceral, moderately than mental, means. Emotionally charged and meticulously researched, We Must Not Think of Ourselves pays homage to the Oneg Shabbat’s aim of honoring the Jewish folks by bearing witness to the whole lot of their expertise. This is a compelling and compassionate tribute that may resonate deeply with readers.
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