Below is an excerpt from Deborah Dash Moore, Posen Library Editor in
Chief’s recent SUMMER newsletter. The message with images is posted in
entirety at
https://www.posenlibrary.com/frontend/deborah-dash-moore-on-anticipating-summer
Quoting from the newsletter,
*“Anticipating summer with its promised pleasures of a relaxed pace, I
thought I’d take a piece of my own advice and peruse the *
*Posen Digital Library*
<
https://posenlibrary.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8f98663ce8f3a4de8ba96898c&id=6e161accc0&e=720979d821>
* (PDL) to see what the word “summer” brought me. Such a diverse collection
of poetry and prose appeared! The selections ranged from the Yiddish
writer Der Nister’s **The Family Mashber*
<
https://posenlibrary.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8f98663ce8f3a4de8ba96898c&id=031f299548&e=720979d821>*
published
in the Soviet Union just before the Holocaust to Zalman Schneour’s lyrical
account of “**Making Jam*
<
https://posenlibrary.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8f98663ce8f3a4de8ba96898c&id=1f4229f121&e=720979d821>*”
from raspberries. Then there was the Hebrew writer A. B. Yehoshua’s
compelling account of a Bible teacher’s stubborn refusal to retire, from **The
Lover*
<
https://posenlibrary.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8f98663ce8f3a4de8ba96898c&id=118f629afe&e=720979d821>
*,** alongside Aharon Appelfeld’s moving depiction of a charged encounter
in a summer field during World War II between a Jew passing as a peasant
with Jewish refugees in “**The Escape*
<
https://posenlibrary.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8f98663ce8f3a4de8ba96898c&id=dc3a127911&e=720979d821>
*.”*
I regularly search the Posen Digital Library to discover places and authors
who tell stories of my ancestors’ lives. For many years I have been
reading the memoirs of displacement and fiction of Israeli Aharon Appelfeld
in order to better understand the Czernovitzi Province, where he was born.
As an adolescent, his mother was murdered in the family’s home and he was
sent by the fascist Romanian troops to a Transnistria labor camp, from
which he escaped and hid in the forests. Once in Israel he wrote in Hebrew
in order to recapture the six years he had lost during the war. Appelfeld
defied the Zionist notion to leave behind the memories of the European
Diaspora and wrote vividly of the secular Jewish world of his youth.
However, his discovery of his father after living separate lives in Israel
for twenty years was too emotional to ever write about.
My maternal ancestors originated and lived in the Bukovina area of then
Romania, which later became Ukraine. At the end of WWI, and after losing
their oldest daughter to the influenza epidemic, my great grandparents took
their orphaned grandsons and moved from their farming estate in Lipkan to
Czernovitz, the capital city of Bukovina and German culture. Between the
world wars, Jews made up more than half of its population. I find
Appelfeld’s stories the best way to capture the lives of that past
generation.
As the journalist, poet Adam Kirsch wrote in the March 9, 2020 issue of New
Yorker, *“**Or perhaps, for Appelfeld, the only possible home was like that
mountaintop—a half-remembered, half-imagined place that could exist only in
the pages of a book.” *
*
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/aharon-appelfelds-legends-of-home*
<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/aharon-appelfelds-legends-of-home>
Pamela Turner
Bridget Marmion Book Marketing LLC
working with The Posen Library www.posenlibrary.com
pturnertaylor_at_gmail.com
216-408-5255
*
http://bit.ly/PosenVid <
http://bit.ly/PosenVid> *
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Received on 2021-06-19 01:41:09