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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