cover image Jewels and Ashes

Jewels and Ashes

Arnold Zable. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $19.95 (216pp) ISBN 978-0-15-146348-0

Australian writer Zable's powerful, beautifully written search for his roots is one of the most moving Holocaust memoirs in recent years. His mother, Hoddes, escaped Poland in 1933, emigrating to Australia where his father, Meier Zabludowski, joined her three years later. Virtually all of the family members they left behind in the cities of Bialystok and Orla perished in the Nazi genocide. Traveling via the Beijing-Moscow Express across Siberia in 1986, Zable went to Poland to meet Jewish survivors and to re-create the lives of his parents and relatives. Blending history, interviews, travel notes and his parents' recollections, he evokes the vibrant life of the Polish shtetl of the '20s and '30s teetering on the brink of annihilation. Zable also documents in harrowing detail the heroic but doomed resistance of Bialystok's Jewish ghetto and its subsequent liquidation. This fierce yet lyrical odyssey is a noble attempt to forge a spiritual connection with the six million Jews claimed by Nazi savagery. (Oct.)