cover image The Right Path: The Autobiography of a Survivor

The Right Path: The Autobiography of a Survivor

Edmund Mandel. Ktav Publishing House, $35 (389pp) ISBN 978-0-88125-498-3

Written with freelancer Egerman, this memoir by a Holocaust survivor who was a teenager in Hungry during WW II resonates with integrity and self-awareness. Mandel was conscripted into a Jewish labor battalion where he and his fellow Jews were subjected to beatings and near-starvation. Surviving by wits and luck, he was liberated by the Russian Army and returned to live in Hungary. His descriptions of encounters with former gentile neighbors, whom he suspects of having some involvement in the deaths of his family and friends, are particularly gripping. A resurgence of anti-Semitism in his country and an oppressive government caused Mandel and his family to escape to the United States during the 1956 Hungarian revolt. Mandel details his early struggles to earn a living in this country and his eventual success in the food-processing business in California. (May)