Mikhal Dekel Livres

The extraordinary true story of Polish-Jewish child refugees who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Iran. číst celé

Focusing on literary representations during the formative period of Zionism, this analysis explores how late 19th-century texts contributed to the development of early Zionist consciousness. Through original readings of works by authors like George Eliot and Theodor Herzl, Mikhal Dekel illustrates the transformation of Jewish identity from a minority to a majority culture via male literary characters. The book contextualizes this shift within broader intellectual movements of the time, examining the interplay of modernity, liberalism, and gender in shaping Jewish literary identities.

Despite decades of outstanding writing about the Holocaust, the full story of roughly a quarter million Jews who survived Nazi extermination in the Soviet interior, Central Asia, and the Middle East is nearly unknown, even to their descendants. Investigating her late father’s mysterious identity as a “Tehran Child,” literary scholar Mikhal Dekel delved deep into archives —including Soviet files not previously available to Western scholars—on three continents. She pursued the path of these Holocaust refugees from remote Kolyma in Siberia to Tashkent in Uzbekistan and, with the help of an Iranian friend and colleague, to Tehran. It was there that her father, aunt, and nearly a thousand other Jewish refugee children survived the war. Dekel’s part-memoir, part-history, part-literary-political reflection on fate, identity, and memory uncovers the lost story of Jewish refuge in Muslim lands, the complex global politics behind whether refugees live or die, and the collective identity-creation that determines the past we remember.

Berührend, bedrückend, höchst lehrreich: Indem Mikhal Dekel die Geschichte ihres Vaters rekonstruiert, der 1939 als Kind von Polen über die Sowjetunion und Persien nach Palästina floh, erzählt sie eine vollkommen unbekannte, größere Geschichte: Die der Flucht von weit über einer Million polnischer Juden Richtung Osten, der größten Gruppe der polnisch-jüdischen Überlebenden.