cover image Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, L930-L949

Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, L930-L949

Toby Fluek. Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95 (110pp) ISBN 978-0-394-58617-5

In charming yet unsentimental art and text, Fluek, a Jew who grew up in the Polish village of Czernica, here remembers life before, during and after the Russian and Nazi occupations: work in the village and at home; religious observances; the incredible hardships borne by her father, sisters, brother and herself--only she and her mother survived the war. In its general outlines, the story is familiar, but Fluek's quiet dignity as a chronicler is fortifying. Her self-reliance and faith in the future are implicit in her visit to the past, and are presented with a pristine, sophisticated calm in even her most horrifying images: a hospital burning, ignited by Nazis in the Brodyname of a Polish town Ghetto, its Jewish patients perishing; Jewish men in the same ghetto forced to transport wagonloads of Jewish corpses to their final resting place. Fluek's view of the world as returned, in some measure, to sanity buoys the book; her tranquility of palette and word, though never denying the sufferings of the past, is distinctly restorative. The author, who lives in New York City, emigrated in 1949. (Oct.)