Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, 1930-1949

by Toby Knobel Fluek, Rakhmiel Peltz (Foreword by)

Overview

Available again for the first time in decades, this jewel of a memoir is the poignant story of a young Jewish girl growing up in a Polish farm village, from the peaceful early 1930s through the tragic war years, and finding safe harbor at last.

“Deeply moving”—Elie Wiesel

“A tone poem evocative of a vanished world”—Chaim Potok

In her own words and with her own beautiful paintings and drawings, artist Toby Knobel Fluek (1926–2011) lovingly unfurls a unique view of Jewish life. She introduces us to her village, to her family, to the people among whom they lived; she shows us how customs and holidays were observed; and, with both feeling and restraint, she illustrates how this long-enduring way of life was shattered by World War II. She depicts her family’s experiences through Russian occupation and the devastation wreaked by the Nazis—and, finally, her new beginning in America.

New to this edition is a foreword by Rakhmiel Peltz, PhD, PhD, Founding Director of the Judaic Studies Program at Drexel University, which he led for twenty years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781891011696
Publisher:	The Experiment
Publication date:	05/21/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	65 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Toby Knobel Fluek (1926–2011) was born in the eastern Polish village of Czernica. In 1942, she and her family were forced by the Nazis into the nearby Brody ghetto. After her escape and years in hiding, she was married in 1949 and emigrated with her husband to New York, where she remained until her death. In 2018, The Florida Holocaust Museum added more than five hundred of Fluek’s artworks and personal items to its collection, and it continues to share her work in exhibitions and outreach programs. Fluek’s daughter, son-in-law, two grandsons and their wives, and four great-grandchildren also strive to ensure her extraordinary legacy.

Editorial Reviews

"Fluek’s realistic, richly detailed paintings could be called ‘folk Vermeer.’"

New York magazine

"Recommended by the Polish Cultural Institute New York

"Deeply moving."

Elie Wiesel

"Toby Fluek’s Memories of My Life in a Polish Village is a beautiful book. Its luminous art and water-clear prose form a world of exquisite images that in the end create a tone poem evocative of a vanished world—a poem that is not a dirge but a gentle celebration of hardships overcome and the triumph of the spirit over unspeakable horror."

Chaim Potok

"Toby Fluek’s brightly remembering palette restores, for our marveling eyes, the nearly thousand-year-old life of the village Jews of Eastern Europe—God-imbued, profound in its simplicity—at the very hour of its murderous destruction by Nazi terror. Her living yet memory-wounded paintings are too vivid—hence too tragically dyed in loss—to be reduced to nostalgia: they are a plain record of the innocence that was annihilated forever by Europe’s great storm of hatred."

Cynthia Ozick

"A remarkable memoir . . . Fluek moves with powerful simplicity through the details of Jewish pre-war life, her struggle to survive the Nazi occupation, and her eventual emigration. . . . A powerful work."

Booklist

"Fluek’s realistic, richly detailed paintings could be called ‘folk Vermeer."

New York Magazine

"This is Anne Frank with pictures."

New York Woman