Customer Reviews

On Foreign Soil

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This is a very poignant and important coming of age memoir. The author a Lithuanain jew describes in colorful detail his youth, the shtetel he grew up in and his extended family and friends.
Of particular importance to contemporary readers are his portrayal of the Slobodka yeshiva and its spiritual director the so called Alter of Slobodka Rabbi Noson Zvi Finkel.A particular important character in the book is the then rav of Rakow, rav Abraham kalmanowitz who shows communal leadership even as a young small town rabbi. Of course he was to become a key player in the Vaad hatzolah in the U.S. during World war 2.
Zolf also is a bit player in the Russian revolution and paints a wondeful portrayal of the first World War and its affect on east Europe's Jewish population. The hunger poverty and destruction described is unbelievable.
Mr. Green's translation is also unique. rather than translating the book , parts of the book are kept in Yiddish but transliterated. This may be a way for the novice to learn some Yiddish, but makes the book very difficult to read and cumbersome.
Nevertheless the book is worth the difficult navigational process, as it contains many gems in both fact and in its rich and idiomatic white Russian Yiddish sprinkled with more than a tad of Russian words including some wonderful curses.
I have not read Kotik's memoirs so I can not compare the two volumes, but by itself this is a worthy account of the suffering of the Jews in 20th century eastern Europe