"Only in Poland could you meet perfectly decent human beings who pretended
to be anti-Semites," writes Zagier of his false arrest by Polish authorities in his home shtetl of Botchki during the 1920s. Wielding this ironic humor with style and ingrained moral outrage, Zagier offers a memoir that reads as easily and entertainingly as Sholom Aleichem's Tevye tales, but frequently packs the emotional punch and biting irony of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Eastern European stories. Fleeing his hometown in 1927, Zagier drafted this memoir in London in the late 1930s and completed it just before his death at 90 in 1998. Zagier's life was crowded with experience—his prologue tells of his journalism and OSS (later the CIA) days, and his trial under McCarthyism—and his reminiscences of shtetl life are amazingly evocative. Whether describing the layout of the village and its use of the eruv—a wire strung about an area to define its religious nature—or the vivid images of the momentous arrival of a new rabbi, Zagier relies on plain, descriptive language rather than metaphor. He continually seeks humor in incipient tragedy: "Those were idyllic days for Botchki. It was still good to be a Jew, so good... that it couldn't possibly be expected to last." His prologue reveals that Botchki was destroyed in the war, and his parents and younger brother died in Treblinka, but his portrait of his prewar milieu avoids sentimentality and cheap foreshadowing. Standing as a memoir of a now-dead way of life and its practitioners, the emotional and literary strength of this book makes it a unique addition to the ever-growing literature on Jewish life and culture. (Oct.)
