Join the Shoah Remembrance Committee’s Holocaust Book Club for their next book discussion – The Story of a Lifeby Aharon Apelfeld
Monday, October 27th
8:15 p.m.
Blue Room and on TIGN Zoom
When Aharon Appelfeld was seven years old the Nazis occupied Czernowitz, his hometown. They penned the Jews into a ghetto and eventually sent whoever had not been shot or starved to death on a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp. As men, women, and children fell away around them, Aharon and his father miraculously survived, and even more miraculously, Aharon escaped from the camp shortly after his arrival there.
The next few years of Aharon’s life were harrowing: he hid, alone, in the Ukrainian forests trying to avoid peasants who are only too happy to turn Jewish children over to the Nazis. Aharon had the to pass himself off as an orphaned gentile when he emerged from the forest to seek work; and, at war’s end, joined the stream of refugees crossing Europe on their way to displaced persons’ camps that were set up for the survivors. Aharon eventually made his way to Palestine. Once there, he built a new life while struggling to retain barely remembered fragments of his old life, and took his first, tentative steps as a writer. Aharon’s goal to bear witness to the unfathomable was realized when his writing received national attention. In The Story of a Life by Aharon Apelfeld, an unforgettable work, Aharon Appelfeld shares personal stories of the experiences that resonate throughout his fiction.
Please RSVP to Carol Smolinsky at smohome6@aol.com and let us know if you’ll be joining us in person or via zoom and if you need help getting a book.
Upcoming book discussions on Mondays at 8:15 p.m.
12/8 – One Good thing by Georgia Hunter
1/26 – Saints and Liars by Deborah Dwork
3/9 – The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp by Lynne Olson
4/20 – Jazz Survivor the Story of Louis Bannet and Dawn by Elie Wiesel
