By: Fannie Brenner Translated by: Rivka Schiller Cover Design: Rachel Kolokoff Hopper 6”x9” Softcover 190 pages
About This Book
The First Part of My Life is a memoir of woman born in pre-WWII Poland, her flight from Nazism to the Soviet Interior, her re-settlement in Poland and Jewish life following the war, growing antisemitism, and immigration to Israel.
The memoir provides insights into what it meant to come of age as an intelligent and ambitious young Jewish woman in the shtetls of pre-World War II Poland. Brenner's Bereza Kartuska is a town marked by the ruins of the monastery of the “Kartuz Brothers.” These same surroundings produced several famous Jewish figures, including the Yiddish writer, Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975); Hebrew poet, Dov Chomsky (1913-1976); poet Masha Shtuker-Paiuk (1914-1988); and artist Moyshe Bernstein (1920-2006).
The memoir also sheds light on the experience of Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet Interior during WWII, and on what it meant to live as a Jew in the shadow of the Holocaust in postwar Poland, only to ultimately flee antisemitism for Israel in 1956.
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