- Hardcover: 270 pages
- Publisher: ORION (14 Feb 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1870015738
- ISBN-13: 978-1870015738
- Product Dimensions: 14.5 x 22 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,395,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The Jewish community of the village of Botchki in Poland was eventually obliterated by the Holocaust. David Zagier left his Polish home in 1927, later becoming a journalist and anti-racial prejudice campaigner who worked for the US Army in counter-intelligence during the War. Botchki recounts Zagier's boyhood in the village, his mounting frustration at its restrictions and his attempts to escape. The "centre of the world", surviving "major upheavals, natural catastrophes and wars", Botchki was both "idyllic" and harsh, immersed in religious ritual and traditional superstition. Suffering frequent poverty, Zagier's family was once reduced to living only on potato skins. Looking back, he wryly refers to his life as "the disasters of my long years", but each "disaster" had driven him on and a cruel world could also be a kind and generous one.
This memory of lives carried on doggedly in the face of hunger, danger and prejudice has frequent touches of humour, a lack of bitterness and much optimism. "Only in Poland," Zagier states, "could you meet perfectly decent human beings who pretended to be anti-Semites". This unexpectedly gentle book, which perhaps has something of the flavour of Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie, begins with the words "In those days". Zagier writes rather like a grandfather telling a tale, a tale which brings a profound acquaintance with both him and a lost world. --Karen Tiley
Product Description
Simultaneously humorus and tragic, this book is a memoir of Jewish shtetl life in Eastern Europe, before World War II, when life was ruled by religion and the Jewish calendar.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Jewish "Angela's Ashes",
By A Customer
This review is from: Botchki (Hardcover)
Botchki of this book, is a small insignificant town, few of us ever heard of, located in eastern Poland, and populated by 400 families equally divided ethnically between Christians and Jews. David Zagier's Botchki relates to a relatively short period of the history of the town which was settled in the 13th Century. It starts in the late 19th Century and culminates when he escapes it in 1927. The story unveils the life style, and tradition of the Jewish people which has since been obliterated from this world. It is this life style that spawned the richest of the Yiddish literature of Sholem Aleichem (Fiddler on the Roof), Y. L. Peretz, Isaac Bashevich Singer, and others.This is a memory of growing up in a Shtetl (town) that was ruled during that short period by four different regimes: Czarist Russia, Imperial Germany, Bolshevik Russia, and Poland. In the words of the author: "Botchki now had four countries to belong to, yet none to call its own." Below officialdom, its tradition and folkways were Byelorussian, Lithunaian, Russian, and Polish. It was "Polish to the Poles, and an amalgam of all four to the Jews." Above all, it is a story of the innocent child's view of the political turmoil, of family and extended family relationships within the community of Jews and Christians. It is a story of a bright child constantly questioning in search of knowledge despite being subjected to religious domination, prejudice, poverty, hunger, and hardships. In some ways it is a Jewish Angela's Ashes, with the added elements of destruction by war caused by the political unrest in addition to the more "normal" hazards of weather, fires and disease. Yet, the story is narrated with love and humor, and manages to keep the reader in suspense to the end to discover the author's fate. The manuscript for the book was written in 1942 while the author was awaiting his next assignment as a war correspondent. It was revised many years later when the author has retired from his last position as Dean of the American University in Leysin, Switzerland, and shortly before he died aged over 90 in 1998. Sadly, the author never knew that the story he so wished to commemorate had been published. - Judy Rozner, Australia.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A shtetl memoir of a world destroyed,
By Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" - Published on Amazon.com
David Zagier wrote this book over a period of sixty years. It was first drafted in the thirties and finished only sixty years later. It tells of his childhood shtetl which was destroyed by the Nazis. He tells of his childhood there , the world of his parents. He attempts to reconstruct a world lost.
This is a clearly written memoir and it tells its story in a good way. There were unfortunately hundreds of other such shtetls who had no one to tell their story, and keep alive if only on the page, those characters and personalities who made their world so colorful. This is a valuable highly readable memoir.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incomparable.,
By "unknown" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Botchki: When Doomsday Was Still Tomorrow (Hardcover)
Loved this. The superlative storytelling is all the more poignant because it's true. Even though this book describes the endless grind of poverty and persecution and its protagonists starved to death three times a day, it is not a depressing read -- quite the opposite. It inspires courage. Is it your grandparents' story as well?
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