East of Time

Remaining human in the face of life's greatest threat.

This book is a rendezvous of history and imagination and dreams and of hopes and disenchantments. It unfolds in a succession of reminiscences that weave together a shimmering tapestry depicting a lost world. The setting is Lodz, Poland, in the years between the author's childhood and early maturity, a period overtaken by the cataclysmic events of the 1930s and early 1940s. The narrative approach presents a powerful personal testament and reflects the determination of an entire community to remain human in the face of its greatest peril, even at the last frontier of life.

East of Time received the 2006 New South Wales Premier's Award for the Best Book of Non-Fiction and was short-listed for the 2006 Australian Literary Society's Gold Medal and the South Australia Arts Festival Award for Innovation in Literature.

Jacob G. Rosenberg was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest member of a working class family. After the Germans occupied Poland, he was confined with his parents, two sisters and their little girls to the Lodz Ghetto, from which they were eventually transported to Auschwitz. Except for one sister (who committed suicide a few days later), all the members of his family were gassed on the day of their arrival. He remained in Auschwitz for about two months, then spent the rest of the war in other concentration camps. In 1948 he emigrated to Australia with his wife Esther; their only child, Marcia, was born in Melbourne. Rosenberg published three books of poetry in English, including My Father's Silence and Twilight Whisper, as well as three earlier volumes of prose and poetry in Yiddish: Snow in Spring, Wooden Clogs with Snow, and Light—Shadow—Light.