Battlefields and Playgrounds (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry)

The story of Jozsef Sondor, a tough, irreverently witty Jewish boy growing up in World War II Hungary, carries readers into the whirl of everyday life in war-torn Budapest, from the eve of the Holocaust in Hungary to Russian liberation in 1945. Through his eyes, we witness history, or, as he sees it, the adult world gone mad. What is this "Jewish problem," he asks. And what can God be thinking of? Jozsef soon finds that his questions have no simple answers, but they do lead him on a journey to understanding the war, politics, religion, and, in the end, the complexity of human nature

Ranen Omer-Sherman is Assistant Professor of English and Jewish Studies at St. Louis University, Madrid. He has published numerous articles and reviews on 20th-century American Jewish literature.