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Mikhal Dekel

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Tehran Children - A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey Hardcover – Illustrated, 8 Oct. 2019

by Mikhal Dekel (Author)

4.6 67 ratings

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The extraordinary true story of Polish-Jewish child refugees who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Iran.

Rather than perish in Nazi-occupied Poland, more than a million Jews escaped to the Soviet Union. There they suffered deprivation in Siberian gulags and "Special Settlements" and then, once "liberated", journeyed to the Soviet Central Asian Republics. The majority lived out the war in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan; some of them continued to Iran. The story of their suffering has rarely been told.

Following the footsteps of her father, one of a thousand refugee children who travelled to Iran and later to Palestine, Dekel fuses memoir with historical investigation in this account of the all-but-unknown Jewish refuge in Muslim lands. Along the way, Dekel reveals the complex global politics behind this journey, discusses refugee aid and hospitality, and traces the making of collective identities that have shaped the post-war world the histories nations tell and those they forget.

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ISBN-10

1324001038
ISBN-13

978-1324001034
Edition

4th ed.
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

8 Oct. 2019
Language

English
Dimensions

16.51 x 3.56 x 24.38 cm
Print length

384 pages
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Product description

Review

"What makes Dekel's study so valuable is not just its assiduous detailing of one family's fate during the second world war, but how it also makes us reflect on our current era, with its mass migrations of desperate people fleeing conflict and hardship only to meet inflamed nativism and the desire to shift responsibility for their fate from one country on to the next." --
-Saskia Baron, The Guardian

"Tehran Children is the story of Dekel's quest to understand where her father came from [ ] that speaks to the terrors of the twenty-first century." --
-Abigail Green, The TLS

"Groundbreaking.....The strength of Dekel's book is that it moves beyond the narrative binary of warm hospitality and abuse to show the grey spaces in between.... it is hope that lies at the center of this moving, heartbreaking testimony.... hope that untold suffering can, and sometimes does, come to an end." --
-Arash Azizi, IranWire

About the Author

Mikhal Dekel is professor of English at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment and Oedipus in Kishinev.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 4th ed. edition (8 Oct. 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1324001038
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1324001034
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.56 x 24.38 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 984,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer reviews:
4.6 67 ratings

About the author

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Mikhal Dekel

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Mikhal Dekel was born in Haifa, Israel, to a Holocaust refugee father and and an Israeli born mother. After completing two years of mandatory army service and a bachelors of law at Tel Aviv University's Buchmann Faculty of Law, she travelled to New York, abandoned the law, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She now lives with her teenage son in Manhattan, where she is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of CCNY’s Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the recipient of many awards - including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation – and is the author of three books and many articles. Her latest book, TEHRAN CHILDREN, is a cross between history and memoir of her Polish-born father, a former child refugee in Central Asia and Iran. To read some of Mikhal's works and find out about events and readings go to mikhaldekel.com.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

67 global ratings

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Amazon Customer

Another less known chapter of WW II

Reviewed in Canada on 23 January 2022

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The book is deeply researched and well presented. This has illuminated one of the obscure areas of WW II history. This in turn has answered some of the questions that many had pondered upon. It is a must for anyone who wants to learn in-depth about the faith of those children and what they went through.

Boiteltoifel

Ergreifend und unfaßbar

Reviewed in Germany on 2 September 2021

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Für nur 355 Seiten habe ich zwei Wochen gebraucht. Das Buch ist sehr lesbar geschrieben, ich mußte es aber häufig beiseite legen, um darüber nachzudenken, im Internet nach den genannten Orten zu suchen und um nicht zu sehr zu verzweifeln. Ich habe sehr viel Neues gelernt. Jetzt frage ich mich, woher all der Haß kommt, der die Welt zerreißt. Wenn die Weltgeschichte eins bewiesen hat, dann ist es, wie sehr Flüchtlinge den Ländern helfen, in denen sie aufgenommen werden. Nicht erst seit die Hugenotten aus Frankreich vertrieben wurden. In der aktuellen Lage (Afghanistan) frage ich mich, ob und wann Deutschland wieder Flüchtlinge aufnimmt.

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bam

Historical narrative of war time suffering

Reviewed in the United States on 27 April 2020

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This amazing chronicle is meticulously researched. It is written by an Israeli college professor in an attempt to retrace the footsteps of her father, who as a child refugee fled Poland with his family into Russia to escape the Nazi terror. The family suffered terribly under the Soviet government, along with hundreds of thousands of other desperate Poles, both Jewish and Catholic. Death by starvation and disease was common, enforced labor was the norm, with the Polish refugee population decimated by unsurvivable hardship. This desolation was not the result of systematic murder but the terrible reality of forced collectivivation and evacuations of millions of Russians internally without proper planning and a chaotic, disrupted food supply. Eventually, the author's grandparents are separated from their children, who are sent to Tehran and eventually to Palestine, where they are cared for on a kibbutz. The grandparents languish in European DP camps for several years, where the father died. The grandmother, however, is finally united with her children in Israel, where a wall of silence surrounds their harrowing experiences. This narrative is not intensely personal, nor is it a typical Holocaust memoir. Instead, the author takes a larger perspective that includes the volatile politics of Polish-Soviet relations, the often catastrophic effects of Soviet policies on its marginal populations, and the British refusal to allow Jewish refugees into Palestine no matter the tragic consequences. The author is able to weave the historical record into the family narrative in a skillful, highly readable fashion. The most striking aspect of this true story is the prolonged suffering endured by countless families, especially the innocent little ones, trapped in the horrors of war.

6 people found this helpful

Caroline Bock

GUTS, RESILIENCE, AND LUCK -- MUST READ

Reviewed in the United States on 31 December 2019

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A story of guts, resilience, and luck -- and the true story of the author Mikhal Dekel's father, aunt and cousin -- and their journey as Jews in a small town in Poland, children of a brewery owner, a successful family generations in this town-- and how they flee east when the Nazis attack into Soviet Union. Their journey is almost unbelievable -- from the Finnish Border where they are forced to work in the winter and cold in the forests -- then evacuated east to Uzbekistan-- and finally, the children only to Tehran.

However, there is another layer to this incredible narrative -- the search. How Dekel peels back the layers of her family's story (her father has died at the open of the story in his new country of Israel) and tries to cope with generational trauma of the Holocaust, of issues of national identity, of the search, seemingly eternal, for what it means to be a Jew. A captivating, complicated story of the Holocaust, of luck, of resilience for a family. As someone who has studied with Professor Dekel at the City University of New York (there are several references to CCNY) in one of the most meaningful classes that I have ever taken -- the Literature of Trauma-- I could hear her questioning, probing, insistent voice throughout this work. However, one doesn't have to be a student of hers to appreciate the struggle to survive on a personal -- and a national level. This is the most meaningful book I read in 2019.

May we have a decade where we understand one another better and with more peaceful intentions than we have in the past --

Caroline

8 people found this helpful

Karen U

The book cover would have been nice. Not worth the trouble to send the book back.

Reviewed in the United States on 30 November 2019

Verified Purchase

The book did not have a paper cover which has book information. The book cover also protects the book.

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