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

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.

“In Toby Knobel Fluek’s evocatively tender yet harrowing memoir, her own vivid artwork commemorates an extinguished way of life. Fluek died in 2011, but her memoir, originally published in 1990, endures in a handsome new edition.”—The Wall Street Journal

“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.