The Narrow Bridge: Beyond the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Isaac Neuman (Author), Michael Palencia-Roth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2000

As a boy studying "Torah", Isaac Neuman learned to seek the spiritual lessons hidden in everyday life. Likewise, in this narrative of occupation and holocaust, he uncovers a core of human decency and spiritual strength that inhumanity, starvation, and even death failed to extinguish. Unlike many Holocaust memoirs that focus on physical suffering and endurance, "The Narrow Bridge" follows a spiritual journey. Neuman describes the world of Polish Jewry before and during the Holocaust, recreating the strong religious and secular personalities of his childhood and early youth in Zdunska Wola, Poland: the outcast butcher, Haskel Traskalawski; the savvy criminal-turned-entrepreneur Nochem Ellia; the trusted Dr. Lemberg, liaison to the German occupation government; and Neuman's beloved teacher, Reb Mendel. Through their stories, Neuman reveals the workings of a community tested to the limits of faith and human dignity. With his brother Yossel, Neuman was transported to the Poznan area, first to the Yunikowo work camp in May 1941, then on to St. Martin's Cemetery camp, where they removed gold jewelry and fillings from exhumed corpses. A string of concentration camps followed, each more oppressive than the last: Frstenfelde, Auschwitz, Fnfteichen, Gross Rosen, Mauthausen, Wels, and Ebensee. In the midst of these horrors, the brothers kept their feet on the "narrow bridge" of life by holding to their faith, their memories, and each other. In the end, only Isaac survived. "The Narrow Bridge" celebrates symbolic victories of faith over brute force. The execution of Zdunska Wola's Jewish spiritual and intellectual leaders is trumped by an act of breathtaking courage and conviction. A secret Passover Seder is cobbled together from hoarded bits of wax, piecemeal prayers, and matzoh baked in delousing ovens. A dying fellow inmate gives Neuman his warm coat as they both lie freezing on the ground. Such rituals of faith and acts of kindness, combined with boyhood memories and a sense of spiritual responsibility, sustained Neuman through the Holocaust and helped him to reconstruct his life after the war. His story is a powerful testimony to an unquenchable faith and a spirit tried by fire.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Neuman's narrative is valuable for his repeated efforts to draw moral lessons from his experiences... Especially useful for readers who wonder how survivors were able to preserve their faith and morality during the Holocaust." -- Richard Lachmann, Multicultural Review ADVANCE PRAISE "This is an extraordinary book. Rarely do we read so movingly of the intimate moments of deep faith in God that sustained so many pious Jews during the terrible years of the Shoah. Through these memoirs, we have a glimpse of the East European Jewish religious life that no longer exists." -- Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College, and author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (April 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 025202561X
• ISBN-13: 978-0252025617
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,358,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Air of Miracle, October 2, 2000

By 

Celia Morris "writer, avid reader, activist" (Washington,, District of Columbia USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Narrow Bridge: Beyond the Holocaust (Hardcover)

With breathtaking courage, Isaac Neuman, in The Narrow Bridge, evokes the lost world of East European Jewry as he knew it in the Polish town of Zdunska Wola, not far from Lodz. So infused with homely spiritual grace was his beloved community that even Puttermilch, the Jewish Mafioso, would dash into a burning building to rescue an old woman's prayer book, and a dotty crone named Reilla could break into a service at the synagogue and shame the congregation into rescuing a fellow Jew from sacrilege Through the eyes of Isaac, a stubborn little boy, easily bored, who loved his curly hair almost enough to risk perdition for it, we meet the gentle rebbe and the canny aunt; we hear the poignant, wrenching songs and the fables dense with wisdom; we smell the challah baking. Most of all we come to know Grandma, "engaged at twelve, married at fourteen, and widowed by thirty"--mother of ten and refuge for the next generation. So passionately did she read her Torah that she could weep for Joseph, sold by his brothers into slavery, and so intent was she on justice that she loudly harangued God when she thought He had let down their side. Then the rebbe is shot along with two others in the town square, Grandma is deported, and the horror begins. With the help of Michael Palencia-Roth, who shaped the narrative, Neuman recalls the ghetto where some Jews toadied to the Nazis while others gave bold, new meaning to words like "brave" and "hero." He remembers, one by one, the seven concentration camps where he was interned in a nightmare world few lived to tell about. An air of miracle hovers about The Narrow Bridge, a triumph of quiet story-telling when the more likely response to memories like these would be a demented scream. Though the family he left behind vanished, and his precious brother Yossel, who was with him in the camps, was murdered at last by the Nazis, Isaac survived, even in spirit-an abiding testament to the strength, depth, and richness of the world that made him, the world that is, in the end, the hero of this fine, indeed luminous book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Narrow Bridge, August 6, 2000

By 

B. Rosenshine (Urbana, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Narrow Bridge: Beyond the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Rabbi Isaac Newman's book, The Narrow Bridge, is a series of thoughtful, well-written, accounts of Jewish life in Poland before, during, and after the Holocaust.

The chronicle begins with pictures of Jewish life in his small Polish town before the Holocaust. His stories of Reb Mendel show, in a way I've never seen, how a teacher used the study of Talmud to slowly teach thoughtful behavior to a tough but puzzled adolescent.

At the center of the book are accounts on life and death in his German occupied ghetto, and life and death in the concentration camps. These stories, of horror and terror, and are wrapped with portrays of human dignity and tenderness. We remember Shlomo Zelichowski, the cantor, and his full-voiced chanting of the closing prayers of Yom Kippur as he and ten men stood before their gallows. We remember the dignified, mischievous, and artful way Newman and his adolescent friends illegally baked matzo for Passover, and we remember the dying Shmuel, who gave Isaac Neuman his coat saying, "You have a duty, Isaac, it is to teach Torah and to help others understand what has happened to us."

These stories are particularly poignant because they are written through the eyes of an adolescent young Talmudic scholar, but informed by the sensibility of a Rabbi in his 70's.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Isaac found, September 2, 2000

By 

Rita Sasso "Rita Sasso" (Panama, Rep. de Panama Panama) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Narrow Bridge: Beyond the Holocaust (Hardcover)

I knew Isaak Neuman as a teenager when he was our Rabbi in Panama. He told us some of these stories but the impact of the whole history is deeply moving. It is a story of survival, not only of the body but of the spirit. He was the first person I ever saw with a number tatood on his arm and it really made me think about how lucky we were.

He taught us to pray and to think. He made us reach out and stretch our brains in directions that we were not used to. He was our friend and teacher.

I saw him once after he left Panama when he came to visit my grandmother. His book came to me by way of a friend who loaned it to me without really knowing who he is. It was like finding an old friend. He hasn't lost his stubborn spirit or his outspoken manner.