The View from Jerusalem: a journal by Jacob Rabinowitz

The translator, Ruth L. Weiss Hohberg, is a grandniece of Izzy; she met him in Jerusalem in 1954. His notebooks came into her possession in the late 1990s. Regarding this work, Ruth says,"This not a work of fiction, nor is it a history text. It is a journal written by a man in his late seventies about deportation, surviving a war, and, later, about life and its challenges in Post-Mandate Palestine. It is a document that adds a good measure of understanding of what the motivations of nations and the individuals who led them were, and how and why interactions took place as they did. The author of the journal is one of the sons of Feivel Rabinowitz, the founder of the textile firm F. Rabinowitz and Sons in Central Europe in the late 19th century. The sons who joined the business on attaining adulthood at the end of WWI were Artur and Joseph, the main sales force, and the inside manager, Jacob, known as Izzy, the author of this work, born in 1885. When WWII engulfed Europe, Izzy was 54 years old; he was a man of knowledge, erudition, and worldly experience. His personal account of history-in-the-making became an education, a linguistic challenge, and ultimately a delight that I embraced enthusiastically. Translating from German to comfortably-flowing English, yet keeping some of the flavor of my uncle’s convoluted sentences articulated with elegant vocabulary, has been exhilarating as well as enriching."Ruth L. Weiss Hohberg was born in Krakow, Poland. She came to the United States after WWII as a twelve-year-old having been taken a political prisoner by the Soviets and transported, along with her parents, to Siberia in 1940. Eventually, the family made their way to Central Asia. When the war ended, they were repatriated to Poland. Educated in New York City, she studied art and later earned a degree in social work. She began writing her autobiographical and non-fiction work when she moved to San Diego, California, in 2000, where she lives, paints, and writes.Ruth is the author of Getting Here: An Odyssey Through World War II, A Girl from Bielsko: Ruth’s Story, Witness and Survivor (translator), Vignettes from Life, Going Places, Here and There, and The View from Jerusalem (translator), all available on Amazon.