cover image Jack and Rochelle

Jack and Rochelle

Jack Sutin. Graywolf Press, $22.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-55597-224-0

Sutin (Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick) crafted this Holocaust account from a series of interviews he conducted with his parents. Narrating alternately, Jack and Rochelle vividly describe how they, as Polish Jews, fled separately in 1942 from their respective ghettos, where they had been relocated by the Germans. Each hid in the woods; and, after harrowing encounters with anti-Semitic escaping Russian soldiers, Rochelle joined Jack's group of Jewish partisans. Although mere acquaintances before the outbreak of war, Jack and Rochelle became lovers and together fought in the resistance movement, enduring near-starvation, disease and the constant threat of capture by Germans and Poles. After the war, the Sutins married and emigrated to the U.S. An unsentimental and informative story. Photos not seen by PW. (May)