We Must Not Think of Ourselves

by Lauren Grodstein

Overview

“This book is a masterpiece: profound, gripping, urgent, and beautiful.” —Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles

A heart-wrenching story of love and defiance set in the Warsaw Ghetto, based on the actual archives kept by thosedetermined to have their stories survive World War II

On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards, and await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Will he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. He learns about their childhoods and their daydreams, their passions and their fears, their desperate strategies for safety and survival. The stories form a portrait of endurance in a world where no choices are good ones.

One of the people Adam interviews is his flatmate Sala Wiskoff, who is stoic, determined, and funny—and married with two children. Over the months of their confinement, in the presence of her family, Adam and Sala fall in love. As they desperately carve out intimacy, their relationship feels both impossible and vital, their connection keeping them alive. But when Adam discovers a possible escape from the Ghetto, he is faced with an unbearable choice: Whom can he save, and at what cost?

Inspired by the testimony-gathering project with the code name Oneg Shabbat, New York Times bestselling author Lauren Grodstein draws readers into the lives of people living on the edge. Told with immediacy and heart, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a piercing story of love, determination, and sacrifice for the many fans of literary World War II fiction such as Kristin Harmel’s The Book of Lost Names and Lauren Fox’s Send for Me.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668640746
Publisher:	Hachette Book Group
Publication date:	11/28/2023
Sales rank:	1,150,121
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lauren Grodstein is the author of Our Short History, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything, and the New York Times-bestselling A Friend of the Family, among other works.  Her stories, essays, and articles have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, and have been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Italian, among other languages.  Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon.com, Barrelhouse, Post Road, and The Washington Post. She is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.
 

Sharon Freedman is an actor, narrator, producer, and international arts educator.

Her acting credits include Just Beyond (Disney+), Chicago Med (NBC), Henry Danger (Nickelodeon), Cold Winter's Night (Emmy Award winner), It's Your Birfday (with Keith David), Ladies Room (official selection of Slamdance), and The Ski Trip (LOGO Network). She won a Scenie Award for best actress in a comedy for her lead role in Ensemble Studio Theater/LA's Pigs and Chickens.

She's done commercials and voice-overs for everything from A&E to Volkswagen and has narrated books for PRH, Tantor, Findaway, Pink Flamingo, and Scholastic.

She is the executive producer of Tisch Represents an organization dedicated to creating opportunities for under-represented voices in the television industry.

She was cocreator and company manager of the play development organization The 24Seven Lab in NYC for seven years, where she developed work by writers including: Pulitzer winner Annie Baker, Tony nominee Lucas Hnath, Macarthur genius grant winner Sam Hunter, WGA award nominee Ron Fitzgerald, and Emmy nominee Cusi Cram.

She was a resident teaching artist with B.R.I.D.G.E. Theatre Project, has taught internationally in Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo, and is currently at teaching artist at California State Prison.

A member of the Obie Award-winning Partial Comfort Productions (NY), EST/LA, and an associate member of Sacred Fools, Sharon is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Playwrights Horizons Theatre School.

Jesse Vilinsky is a classically trained actress and voice actor, having graduated from the USC School of Dramatic Arts and BADA in London. She has lent her voice to numerous film and television projects and has worked on various video games, animation, and commercial projects as well. As a narrator, Jesse has garnered recognition in AudioFile magazine for her expertly voiced characters and ability to bring forth the strength and truth of their stories.

Editorial Reviews

[R]ealistic, heartrending… with intimate, detailed portraits… Thought-provoking, tender, and horrifying, this memorable novel of Jewish lives in the Warsaw Ghetto offers timeless lessons.

Shelf Awareness

[A] moving chronicle, a worthy tribute to those who fought to survive the unthinkable.

Booklist

This book is a masterpiece: profound, gripping, urgent, and beautiful. In its clear-eyed and devastating portrait of the past, Grodstein invites us into the present; to bear witness to the lives that have come before us, while finding meaning and courage for our own.

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe and Madeline Miller

This heart-wrenching tale explores love, defiance, and sacrifice in the face of unimaginable circumstances, making it a compelling addition to the literary World War II fiction genre.

Beyond The Bookends

[A] gripping historical novel.

Washington Post

09/04/2023

Grodstein (Our Short History) draws on archival records for an eloquent story of the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII. Adam Paskow, a childless widower, teaches English to a group of children in the ghetto, where he lives in a cramped apartment with two other families, having been forced there from the spacious flat he once shared with his wife in the city’s Mokotow district. Because of his language skills, he’s tasked by Emanuel Ringelblum, a historical figure who organized relief agencies for Jews during the war, with interviewing their fellow residents and compiling an archive of their experiences. The novel is formed mainly from these interviews along with Paskow’s observations about how life has changed after the German occupation. His interview subjects include 11-year-old Fillip Lescovec, who dreams of becoming a construction worker, and 48-year-old Emil Wiskoff, who can trace his family back to its Vilna roots in 1648. There’s not much of a plot, though Grodstein makes her persecuted characters achingly human, such as when Paskow has a secret, life-affirming affair with one of the married women who shares his apartment. The story doesn’t shy away from the period’s horror, however; there are wrenching scenes of Nazis beating and killing men, women, and children on the streets. This will stay with readers. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"This book is a masterpiece: profound, gripping, urgent, and beautiful. In its clear-eyed and devastating portrait of the past, Grodstein invites us into the present; to bear witness to the lives that have come before us, while finding meaning and courage for our own." —Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles

“In We Must Not Think of Ourselves, Lauren Grodstein writes with such a blazing commitment to the truth of the Warsaw Ghetto that sometimes I had to stop reading and catch my breath. But in the midst of the brutality, she clears a path for the parallel stories of love and decency. Make no mistake: this is a heartbreaking portrait of a dark moment. But this novel shimmers with light.”

—Lauren Fox, New York Times bestselling author of Send for Me

We Must Not Think of Ourselves is one of those rare books—beautifully written, seamlessly constructed, quietly devastating—that manages to tell an old story in a new way with no pyrotechnics beyond perfect storytelling, including an ending that will stay with me always. It is far and away my favorite novel of the year, of many years, and I know I will be recommending it to readers forevermore.—Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of One Two Three

From the Publisher

08/01/2023

The latest novel from Grodstein (Our Short History) tells the story of Adam Paskow and the efforts of the historical Oneg Shabbat group to keep a record of those living in occupied Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. Adam is a Jewish educator with relentless optimism in spite of the Nazi invasion. Having been swindled by his father-in-law, he finds himself living in a small apartment with nine other people, all of whom have been relocated to Poland's old Jewish district and locked in. Emanuel Ringelblum, the real-life archivist behind Oneg Shabbat, finds Adam teaching children English in secret and recruits him to start documenting his life and the lives of those around him. Grodstein brings to life a critical piece of history with her strong sense of place and complex characters who are determined to live their lives despite daily threats of violence and dehumanization. The Oneg Shabbat archive contains vital first-hand accounts of Jewish subjugation, and it is represented beautifully in Grodstein's first historical novel, supported by her intensive research and the book's dynamic relationships that show the value of everyday intimacies. VERDICT Recommended for readers who enjoy stories from all time periods about the extraordinary actions of ordinary people.—Cate Triola

Library Journal

Five remarkable narrators create an unforgettable portrait of the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII. Brad Griffith provides the main narration as Adam Paskow, a language and literature teacher who lost his beloved wife, Kasia. After being relocated to the Warsaw Ghetto, he is recruited by the real-life Oneg Shabbat to document the histories of the Jews there. Jesse Vilinsky, Sharon Freedman, Amir Levi, and Rich Keeble create memorable portraits of the students, housemates, and acquaintances Adam interviews. The narrators evoke an unimaginable world wherein Jews must sell their few possessions for food to supplement their meager rations. At any moment, Nazi officers can kill them for the slightest offense. Listeners will feel as though they are witnessing history. A must-listen. M.J. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2024 - AudioFile

★ 2023-08-30
An English teacher documents life in the Warsaw ghetto.

Before the Nazis invaded, 42-year-old Adam Paskow was a secular Jew. He lived in Warsaw with his cat, taught at a Polish school, and mourned his late wife, a wealthy Pole who died too young. After the Nazis invade, he is forced out of his home and into the Jewish ghetto where he shares a small apartment with two families (though the kids often sleep on the roof or in the sewers or hallways). He works in a soup kitchen and gives English lessons to children in the basement of a bombed-out movie theater, teaching them poems he has memorized, due to the lack of books. Early on, Adam is given a notebook from a real, historical organization called Oneg Shabbat to write everything he can about life under the Nazis for posterity. His account—this book—is moving and tender. “The truth is,” Adam writes, “it was hard to know what to think or how to behave, and I spent an awful lot of time either staring into space or digging myself into the deep hole of memory.” But Adam’s memories of his fairly average life before the war provide a contrast to the intentional, increasing meagerness of the life allowed in the ghetto. His interviews with his students and housemates offer a wealth of distinct histories, subtle but potent rebukes to the cruel and useless labeling perpetuated by the Nazi regime. Adam has the poetic optimism of a person for whom the worst has already happened, who is content for a while to count small blessings, but he is neither foolish nor passive. When risking death by missing curfew in order to walk a wayward student home, he notes, “there were corpses on the street, covered with newspapers that fluttered in the wind. We pretended not to see them.”

Delicate, warm account of a brutal, cold time, grounded in humanity, small details, and unwavering clarity.

Kirkus Reviews