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Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story -- the extraordinary saga of two thirds of Polish Jewish survivors -- has never been fully toldAuthor Mikhal Dekel's father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as "special settlements." Then came a journey during which tens of thousands died of starvation and disease en route to the Soviet Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. While American organizations negotiated to deliver aid to the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews who remained there, Dekel's father and aunt were two of nearly one thousand refugee children who were evacuated via Polish military transport to Iran, where they were embraced by an ancient Persian-Jewish community celebrating familiar rituals in unfamiliar ways. Months later, their Zionist caregivers escorted them via India to Mandatory Palestine, where, at the endpoint of their 13,000 mile journey, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees (including over one hundred thousand Polish Catholics) . The arrival of the "Tehran Children" was far from straightforward, as religious and secular parties vied over their futures in what would soon be Israel.Beginning with the death of the inscrutable Tehran Child who was her father, Dekel fuses memoir with extensive archival research to recover this astonishing story, with the help of travel companions and interlocutors including an Iranian colleague, a Polish PiS politician, a Russian oligarch, and an Uzbek descendent of Korean deportees. The history she uncovers is one of the worst and the best of humanity, of fate and destiny, of hospitality and of cruelty, of love and hate. The experiences her father and aunt endured, along with so many others, ultimately reshaped and redefined their lives and identities and those of other refugees and rescuers, profoundly and permanently, during and after the war.With literary grace, Tehran Children presents a unique narrative of the Holocaust, whose governing symbol is not the concentration camp, but the refugee, and whose center is not Europe, but Central Asia and the Middle East. 10 illustrations
About the Author
Mikhal Dekel was born in Haifa, Israel, to a Holocaust refugee father and and an Israeli born mother. After completing two years of mandatory army service and a bachelors of law at Tel Aviv University's Buchmann Faculty of Law, she travelled to New York, abandoned the law, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She now lives with her teenage son in Manhattan, where she is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of CCNY's Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the recipient of many awards - including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation - and is the author of three books and many articles. Her latest book, TEHRAN CHILDREN, is a cross between history and memoir of her Polish-born father, a former child refugee in Central Asia and Iran. To read some of Mikhal's works and find out about events and readings go to mikhaldekel.com.
