Family Stories: Travels Beyond the Shtetel [Hardcover]

Rose Choron (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0934710171 | ISBN-13: 978-0934710176 | Publication Date: March 1989 | Edition: 2nd

Illustrations From Small Town, My Destroyed Home, A Recollection by Issachar Ber Ryback

Editorial Reviews

Review

A lovely book. Truly lovely. A Chagall-like meditation on a joyful and frightening voyage through the 20th century. Without guile or pretension, Rose Choron is a marvelous storyteller. -- Andre Gregory

Rose Choron brings an entirely original voice-graceful, intelligent and witty-to her heart-warming tales of a colorful and talented family in its transition from the shtetel of Eastern Europe to the cosmopolitan excitements of western life. -- Chaim Raphael

Your book is utterly charming. I didn't know what to expect, but I was caught up almost immediately in your story. You have a great gift of narrative. I haven't quite figured out what makes it so effective perhaps it's the poetic form, perhaps it's the deceptive simplicity, perhaps it's the precision of the diction. In any case, it was a wonderful read and a lovely and loving recreation of the past. -- Lucy S. Dawidowicz

From the Author

I gave myself free rein, writing both on some of my own experiences and on the common background of family members and friends between, and around, World War I and World War II. With this in mind, I recall life in a Lithuanian shtetel; then in Berlin, Switzerland, and intermittently in other countries, including the United States and Israel. I have tried to convey the general climate and atmosphere of all these places at the time, as well as personal episodes. The stories are primarily about my own and other Jewish families migrating from the shtetel into the outside world. They tell about young people growing up under such circumstances, exposed to constant readjustments and dangers.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 125 pages
• Publisher: Pangloss Pr; 2nd edition (March 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0934710171
• ISBN-13: 978-0934710176
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,421,953 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #70 in Books > Travel > Europe > Lithuania

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Family Stories: Travels Beyond the Shtetel, November 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Family Stories: Travels Beyond the Shtetel (Hardcover)

An important book treating a serious subject with charm and humor through brief, poetic vignettes. The wanderings of a Jewish family come alive without pathos or sentimentality, taking the reader from their home in Lithuania in the 1920's through Germany and Switzerland, to arrival in the United States in 1939. I have given this book as a Bar/Bat Mitzvah present and been told that the whole family was entranced by it.