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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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JET LAG

Ann Birstein

"European Discovery Tour” was the title on the travel brochure. But as Ann Birstein knew, the journey that she signed up for included a discovery of the most unhappy places on the continent.
Her little tour group, most all of them Jewish, was shepherded not only to some of Eastern Europe’s grandest locales but also to its most terrible, including the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, and other grim reminders of the Holocaust and the lost Jews of Europe.

Along the way in what became a search for her own soul, Ms. Birstein offers a moving perspective on a tragic people trapped by history.

Ann Birstein is the author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, which include the novels American Children and Summer Situations; an autobiography, What I Saw at the Fair; and a biography of her father, The Rabbi on Forty-Seventh Street. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, and many other publications. Her grants and honors include a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has taught and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. At Barnard College, where she was a professor for many years, she founded and directed Writers on Writing.
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Book

Published 2013-08-01 by Now and Then Reader eBook

Book

Published 2013-08-01 by Now and Then Reader eBook

Comments

What would compel someone to visit the most sorrowful sites of Eastern Europe? For Ann Birstein, she had no choice: it was simply time "to see for myself those terrible places." In this raw and mesmerizing account of her incongruously named "European Discovery Tour," Birstein learns the awful mathematics of the Holocaust--how Poland, for example, is home to just a few thousand Jews, down from three and a half million before World War II. As such "terrible population statistics" add up, the numbers become "impossible to assimilate." At one point the tour group stands at the edge of a mass grave in which ten thousand Jews were buried. "How had they all fit in here?" Birstein asks. "Who had counted?" Birstein feels disconnected from modern Poland and Hungary--"A busful of Jews in a hostile, gentile universe"--and the beautiful cities of Eastern Europe all seem tainted and unlovable. Even a sunset cruise down the Danube turns somber when the tour guide points out the beautiful homes once owned by Jewish families, and explains that they were all shot and thrown into the river. "Were they still down there, clothes and all?" Birstein wonders. Yet, by the end of the soul-wrenching journey, she finally realizes that after the death camps, cemeteries, and cities of slaughter, what she's ultimately discovered is a glimpse into lives once lived, and a comforting sense that the long-deceased victims existed, and mattered--"real people with real houses, real clothes, real food, real families...and I loved them more and more, not for what had been done to them but for who they were.