Botchki: When Doomsday Was Still Tomorrow - Hardcover

Zagier, David

4.56

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780807614969: Botchki: When Doomsday Was Still Tomorrow

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807614963 ISBN 13: 9780807614969

Publisher: George Braziller Inc., 2001

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With the humor and clearsightedness of one who loved the shtetl, but who worked hard to escape from it, Zagier records the rhythms and texture of everyday life in Botchki, a small town northeast of Warsaw, from the early years of the century until 1927.

The author glories in the details of growing up and explores every irony, every twist of fate, every historical fact, as history rushed past this shtetl, sometimes affecting it, sometimes just passing it by. Life was ruled by religion, and he recounts his growing rebelliousness against God, who gives his life meaning and yet allows so much suffering.

First set down on the eve of World War II, finished fifty years later, and now published for the first time, Botchki is a testament to a vanished world. This important and moving memoir is essential reading for everyone interested in issues of Jewish life, identity, and exile, as seen through the lens of life in an Eastern European shtetl in the early twentieth century.

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About the Author:

David Zagier escaped from Botchki in 1927. He worked as a journalist in South Africa, Paris, and London. During the war, he made his way to New York, where he again worked as a journalist until he was drafted into the US Army. He later became a college professor and eventually settled in Switzerland. He completed this memoir shortly before his death in 1998.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Only in Poland could you meet perfectly decent human beings who pretended to be anti-Semites," writes Zagier of his false arrest by Polish authorities in his home shtetl of Botchki during the 1920s. Wielding this ironic humor with style and ingrained moral outrage, Zagier offers a memoir that reads as easily and entertainingly as Sholom Aleichem's Tevye tales, but frequently packs the emotional punch and biting irony of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Eastern European stories. Fleeing his hometown in 1927, Zagier drafted this memoir in London in the late 1930s and completed it just before his death at 90 in 1998. Zagier's life was crowded with experience his prologue tells of his journalism and OSS (later the CIA) days, and his trial under McCarthyism and his reminiscences of shtetl life are amazingly evocative. Whether describing the layout of the village and its use of the eruv a wire strung about an area to define its religious nature or the vivid images of the momentous arrival of a new rabbi, Zagier relies on plain, descriptive language rather than metaphor. He continually seeks humor in incipient tragedy: "Those were idyllic days for Botchki. It was still good to be a Jew, so good... that it couldn't possibly be expected to last." His prologue reveals that Botchki was destroyed in the war, and his parents and younger brother died in Treblinka, but his portrait of his prewar milieu avoids sentimentality and cheap foreshadowing. Standing as a memoir of a now-dead way of life and its practitioners, the emotional and literary strength of this book makes it a unique addition to the ever-growing literature on Jewish life and culture.

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