Ship of the Hunted

This second volume of Elberg's work to debut in English has all the grit of The Empire of Kalman the Cripple (see review above), but none of the humor. The Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 is nothing like the prewar village of Dombrovka. The family of Golda (a seamstress), her husband, Shiya (a writer who takes a job in the post office), and their three children (Nenna, Yossel and Hannele) do the best they can. The ghetto is in flames; Jews are brutally killed, while survivors are forced to sell their winter coats for scraps of bread. But horrors worse than the ghetto exist. At the Umschlagplatz, the train station from which the Jews are deported to the East, Shiya and Nenna are herded to the left, sentenced to die in the ovens of Auschwitz. Golda is taken to Treblinka but manages to escape by digging a hole under a fence, after which she wanders the Polish countryside, naked and without hope. Yossel, whose fair hair and blue eyes let him pass for Christian, assumes the Polish name of Yurek, becomes a smuggler and hides out with Hannele on a farm, but even there tragedy awaits. Elberg traces the fates of this sundered family, as some survive (and some don't) to see the end of the war and attempt the difficult passage from Europe to Palestine on a ""ship of the hunted."" Originally published in Israel in 1974, this is a strong, unsentimental contribution to the literature of the Holocaust. (May)