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Lauren Grodstein is the author of Our Short History, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything, and the New York Times-bestselling A Friend of the Family, among other works. Her stories, essays, and articles have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, and have been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Italian, among other languages. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon.com, Barrelhouse, Post Road, and The Washington Post. She is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.
Lauren Grodstein's website
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Dear Reader,
We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a novel I never expected to write. I had no ambition to tell a story about the Holocaust; people like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi had already done the brutal job as perfectly as it could be done. I could not imagine attempting to put myself in their company.
But in July 2019, I discovered the stories of the people of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Or, more specifically, during a family trip to Warsaw, a tour guide brought us to the Jewish Historical Institute, a prosaic name for an extraordinary place. The institute houses the Emanuel Ringelblum Archive, the work of thirty-two secret diarists who, under the direction of historian Emanuel Ringelblum, secretly recorded everything about their imprisonment in the ghetto from 1940–1943. In comprehensive detail, their reports describe the ghetto's schools, synagogues, and prisons; its marriages and births; its struggles to feed its population; and its terror at the oncoming deportations to Treblinka. Their work constitutes the most significant written testimony of what was once Europe's largest Jewish community.
Of the thirty-two diarists, three survived; they were the ones who showed authorities where to dig up the buried archive after the war. ...
Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of many highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses -- a book beloved by readers all over the world and the volumes Deep Play, A... (more)
If you enjoyed:
We Must Not Think of Ourselves
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by Diane Ackerman
Judy Batalion is the author of White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess in Between. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, the Washington Post, and many other publications. Prior to her ... (more)
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We Must Not Think of Ourselves
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