Tehran children A Holocaust refugee odyssey

Dekel (City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY) has authored a number of books on various aspects of Jewish history and culture. With Tehran Children she has made an important contribution to Holocaust scholarship. Dekel focuses on her father's journey as a child from Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 to the Soviet Muslim republics, where in Uzbekistan he was one of hundreds of thousands of Jews who escaped the clutches of Nazi Germany. From there he migrated to Iraq and later evacuated to Iran, where he was placed in the Jewish Children's Home of Tehran, before he was finally resettled in Palestine thanks to Zionist organizations. Much of the book covers the Jewish children placed in the Tehran orphanage, recounting the many problems they faced, from issues of identity to psychological troubles and the anti-Semitism of the Polish children who made the same journey to Iran. Of special interest is Dekel's description of the hostility Palestinian Jews experienced from many in the Polish army (Anders' Army) who were stationed in Palestine during the war. There is never a dull moment in this excellent read, which includes an exceptional bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Jack Robert Fischel, emeritus, Messiah College

Retracing the path her Polish-born father and aunt took as Jewish children fleeing the Nazis in 1941 brought Dekel (The Universal Jew, 2011) closer to understanding her father, who by the time she knew him was a quintessential Israeli. Thrust into refugee life at age 12, they first traversed Soviet states, then were part of a youth-rescue caravan heading to Tehran, where a burgeoning Polish community (not everyone was Jewish) lived in difficult conditions, but far from the horrors of Nazi-controlled Europe. Using historical documents, interviews, and contemporaneous testimonies collected from her father and other refugee children, Dekel retells stories about the plight of WWII European refugees. Ultimately, as part of a wave of over 1,000 Jewish-Polish youths known as the Tehran Children, they immigrated to Palestine, where they were transformed; no longer persecuted, they were pioneers in what would become Israel six years later. The backstory about how Dekel, now a professor of comparative literature in the U.S., began researching this project with an Iranian colleague, adds an interesting personal aspect to this work of excellent scholarship and a harrowing history illuminating both the specifics of the past and the universal aspects of the refugee experience.--Dan Kaplan Copyright 2019 Booklist