From Booklist
Yossel Rakover was first published as fiction in 1946 in a Yiddish daily in Buenos Aires. The story, set in 1943 in the Warsaw ghetto, purports to be a 14-page statement written by one Yossel Rakover, a Polish Hasidic Jew, as he awaits certain death. Its central theme is that even during the most brutal times when God's face is hidden and he seems unreachable and indifferent, the bond between God and humans holds. It was mistakenly reprinted in Israel as an authentic document discovered in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto and subsequently appeared in many other languages. Kolitz, a film producer, writer, and teacher in New York, has written a prefatory note to this edition on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and the book includes his semidocumentary story, "Requiem for a Jealous Boy," first published in 1989, which deals with what Kolitz calls the supremacy of Torah over "religion" even in Auschwitz. The book also includes essays about the story and its religious significance by such notable scholars as Emmanuel Levinas, the leading Franco-Jewish philosopher; Catholic theologian Frans Jozef Van Beeck; Professor Klaus Berger of Heidelberg University; and Dr. Marvin Fox of Brandeis University; as well as a forward by Norman Lamm, president of Yeshiva University. George Cohen
