Edith Saposnik Kaplan grew up in the Chernobyl area in the Russian Empire in the early years of the twentieth century, a time Eli Wiesel has dubbed “the Shoah before the Shoah.” This valuable eyewitness testimony of those chaotic years recounts the pogroms that killed as many as a hundred thousand Jews as warring gangs of bandits and soldiers roamed the land that is today Ukraine, and refugees from the upheavals of World War I flowed this way and that. Against this backdrop, the perceptive author of this remarkable memoir grew into a woman as her family wended their way to freedom in the United States, paying steep costs along the way.
This new edition of the book Eli Wiesel once praised is enhanced by a historically accurate map, ample photographic illustrations, and an epilogue that traces the next generations and how they serendipitously discovered each other. This book will resonate for anyone with an immigrant background, the world over.