Beshert: A MEMOIR "IT WAS MEANT TO BE"

Beshert: "It Was Meant To Be"
Book-in-Progress

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WHY THIS BOOK?

Click below to listen to excerpts from the book

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3EnbQvpgZM

Keep Pace with the Sun The Story of Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc

Translated by Suzanna Eibuszyc and Edited by Pamela Jay Gottfried

http://keeppacewiththesun.blogspot.com/

“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun,

the day is a perpetual morning.”

Henry David Thoreau

Transmitting the memory of the vibrant culture before the Holocaust is just as important just as the memory of the Holocaust, to combat ignorance and prejudice and sharing of cultures and knowledge of history. It is my goal to bring this book out of obscurity and into a wide readership, a book, which will take its place in the curriculum at the high school and college level, while teaching the important aspects of Eastern European twentieth-century history.

There are only a few thousand Jews left in Poland today, but once Poland was the home to the largest Jewish population in Europe. Before WWII, over 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland, making it the second largest Jewish community in the world. WWII destroyed this community completely, devastating their distinctive culture and society. The extent of the loss was so great, so destructive; we know it as the Holocaust, the Shoah.

“Beshert is among the very few English language memoirs that recount what remains—astonishingly—the great untold story of the Holocaust.”

Atina Grossman, Professor of History

Cooper Union College, New York

Four years ago, on the day of her death, I opened the box containing my mother’s notebooks. Writing in Polish, in a shaky hand, my mother filled pages with the memories of her childhood and young adulthood in Warsaw in the interwar years, her struggle to survive as a young Jewish woman in slave labor in the Soviet Interior, during World War II.

“It was beshert,” she wrote. "Meant to be.” How else could she explain why she had lived, while millions had perished?

Her decision to flee Warsaw after the Nazi occupation haunted her all her life. A young woman of 22, she left behind starving brother and sisters and their young children, thinking she would return in a few weeks. Instead, to survive, she kept going east, traveling into the unknown on trains packed with other Jewish refugees. Soon she found herself in Stalinist Russia, far from Poland and family, full of remorse, but it was a decision that saved her life.

The second part of the book is a tale of survival in Soviet occupied territories, Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan until March 1946. Soviet Russia and Soviet-occupied Central Asia proved to be for Polish Jews the single best chance for surviving and escaping the catastrophe that engulfed Poland’s Jews during the Second World War.

Very little is known of the day-to-day lives of those refugees, who after the 1939 invasion found themselves under the Russian occupation. Stalin saw them as “Enemies of the People”. Arrests, killings, and deportations into forced labor in the Russian interior followed. From 1939 to 1946 the refugees subsisted in subhuman conditions: made to work in extremes of heat and cold, enduring brutal punishment, imprisonment, disease: typhus, malaria, dysentery, and scurvy, facing starvation. Only a quarter of those who found themselves in the vast Russian territory made it out alive. My mother, her oldest sister Pola and Abram Eibuszyc--the man who would become my father--were among them.

Roma Talasowicz-Eibuszyc was born in Warsaw in 1917, the youngest of six. Her father died when she is a one year old baby. The first half of Beshert tells of her childhood and young adulthood: moments of exquisite tenderness and love in the family contrasted with unspeakable poverty, desperation and tragedy.

When Roma was ten, her mother suffered a paralyzing stroke. For the next four years, until the day of her death, the six children cared for their mother at home, doing their best to keep the little household going.

At fourteen she graduated with distinction from public school, but her dream of going on to high school and continuing with her education was cut short by the need to support herself. As a young working girl Roma began to experience the differences among classes in the Jewish community in Warsaw. She became active in the Bund movement, the Jewish Workers Party, taking part in demonstrations to fight for social equality on behalf of her generation--at times, endangering her own life.

Beshert “reads like a Jewish version of Angela’s Ashes….”

Aaron Elster, Vice President, Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center,child survivor.

Beshert is a rich, living document, a thirty-year account that reveals the life of a vibrant young woman with hopes and dreams for a better world who lived to bear witness to unspeakable suffering and all that she saw, felt, and thought. It is a story of sacrifice, determination, loyalty, and love. It pays tribute to our history and legacy that is now almost forgotten, the vibrant Jewish culture of Eastern Europe that was forever decimated by the events of WWII and
that future generations deserve to hear.

HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN

It was while I was studying with Professor Eli Wiesel at the City University of New York that I began to think my mother’s life story might be worthy of being recorded. When I told him about my mother’s life he said, “Your mother must write her story. Future generations must know. You must help her to do it.”

She did not think she was strong enough to re-enter the memories or bear the pain. But in the words of Eli Wiesel "silence is never an option", so at great risk to her sanity and her health she agreed to commit her memories to paper. She wrote the memoir she called Beshert to honor the ones who had not lived and so that future generations have a way to remember her vibrant Jewish community that flourished before WWII.

PRAISE

When I sent the English translations of Beshert to scholars in the U.S. and Israel the response was overwhelming. Leading scholars in the US and Israel have responded with praise for Beshert noting its historical value, its ability to inspire and teach readers young and old, and the important contribution it will make to current and future generations.

A literary agency in New York recommended its development as a young adult novel.

Beshert has been called a historical memoir and a gripping true-life story, a worthy addition to high school and college curriculums.

Beshert is

Read scholarly reviews here.

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