With the humor and clearsightedness of one who loved the shtetl, but who worked hard to escape from it, Zagier records the rhythms and texture of everyday life in Botchki, a small town northeast of Warsaw, from the early years of the century until 1927. The author glories in the details of growing up and explores every irony, every twist of fate, every historical fact, as history rushed past this shtetl, sometimes affecting it, sometimes just passing it by. Life was ruled by religion, and he recounts his growing rebelliousness against God, who gives his life meaning and yet allows so much suffering. First set down on the eve of World War II, finished fifty years later, and now published for the first time, Botchki is a testament to a vanished world. This important and moving memoir is essential reading for everyone interested in issues of Jewish life, identity, and exile, as seen through the lens of life in an Eastern European shtetl in the early twentieth century. 9 black-and-white illustrations.

Review

The Jewish community of the village of Botchki in Poland was eventually obliterated by the Holocaust. David Zagier left his Polish home in 1927, later becoming a journalist and anti-racial prejudice campaigner who worked for the US Army in counter-intelligence during the War. Botchki recounts Zagier's boyhood in the village, his mounting frustration at its restrictions and his attempts to escape. The "centre of the world", surviving "major upheavals, natural catastrophes and wars", Botchki was both "idyllic" and harsh, immersed in religious ritual and traditional superstition. Suffering frequent poverty, Zagier's family was once reduced to living only on potato skins. Looking back, he wryly refers to his life as "the disasters of my long years", but each "disaster" had driven him on and a cruel world could also be a kind and generous one.

This memory of lives carried on doggedly in the face of hunger, danger and prejudice has frequent touches of humour, a lack of bitterness and much optimism. "Only in Poland," Zagier states, "could you meet perfectly decent human beings who pretended to be anti-Semites". This unexpectedly gentle book, which perhaps has something of the flavour of Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie, begins with the words "In those days". Zagier writes rather like a grandfather telling a tale, a tale which brings a profound acquaintance with both him and a lost world. --Karen Tiley

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