28 January 2007 MENDEL'S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR by Martin Lemelman, Free Press, October 2006, ISBN: 0-7432-9162-X

MENDEL'S DAUGHTER details the harrowing story of Martin Lemelman's mother and her family during the Holocaust. It is a story that Lemelman grew up knowing very little of. But in 1989, after his mother, Gusta, dropped a frozen chicken on her foot (causing it to be broken), Lemelman brought her to stay at his house in Pennsylvania. In part to curtail her efforts to do all of the cooking and cleaning at his house with her broken foot, and in part to have a family history that he would be able to pass along to his own children, Lemelman persuaded his mother to finally share her story. He wisely videotaped her. After her death a decade ago, he watched the recording, edited the story Gusta related by reorganizing it chronologically and augmenting her accounts with those of his Uncle Isia, who also survived. He then illustrated it with hundreds of drawings interspersed with actual documents and some little black and white photos his mother had saved from her childhood.

"So the Gestapo man walked over to a Sheygitz, a young Gentile, and he ask him if he know where the Jews live. He wanted to call a Jew to push the car and who knows what else. So he came over to our house and he found me in the house. I go outside. He wants my brother should help move his car. So I ask him maybe to let Isia to go in to take the jacket. It is so cold. I talk to him in German. I speak so good. I speak so good with him that he understood everything. He let Isia go in for the jacket.

"Now Yetala knows what could be if he goes with the bastards. So Yetala chased Isia out. He jumps through the kitchen window. 'Run like the deer,' she says. And he runs like the wind. And then this Nazi realized that Isia was not there. 'Come inside with me,' he said. I said, 'No,' and I stood still like a stone. So still that if they gave me a million dollars I couldn't move my legs. That's how stiff I was. He went into the house and he saw the windows were open...Meanwhile, I was standing, buried. I couldn't move. I couldn't move, because I was frightened. So then, when he came out again, he was very heated. Angry. He saw that he lost his Jew. He said to me again to come inside. If I would have come inside, he would have killed me.

"On the street in that time, 1941, he still didn't have the right to kill us. So then he came over to me with the rifle. He turned the rifle over and gave it to me on the head. In the street, there were peoples with cars, and with wagons. Gentiles with the wagons, with the cars, didn't do anything.

"I believed I was going to be a cripple. He ran to me with such anger and he gave me such a hit in the head and by the ear that, pardon me, my period went. My period was pouring out blood and my ear was pouring out blood, and from my hair was pouring blood.

"But I survived. At night was everything in order. My father comes home, my mother comes home, Isia comes home, Yetala comes home. Maybe a month later we moved out."

This particular portion of Gusta Mendel's story covers three and one-half large trim pages and is accompanied by a dozen of Lemelman's pencil and ink drawings ranging from a trio of one and one-half inch side by side squares up to several large half-page illustrations. The interplay of story and illustration makes for a telling that won't easily be forgotten.

Gusta Mendel grew up in a prosperous and well-regarded Jewish family in a portion of Poland that is now part of the Ukraine. This was a region that during World War II was invaded first by the Communists and then by the Nazis. We know from the outset of this memoir that this is a story of survival, that Gusta made it through the Holocaust. Following the historical and personal events that are depicted in this book, Gusta would eventually come to America and, with her husband, raise Lemelman and his brother in the back of their Brooklyn candy store.

The rest of the Mendel family was murdered by the Nazis, but Gusta, Isia, Yetala, and another sibling, Simon, lived. The four siblings survived in the woods through two winters, digging themselves a series of underground shelters, burying the potatoes and sugarbeets they'd steal from fields in the middle of the night, and getting some help from a few people who were sympathetic to their plight.

"For us, the war ended in March-April 1944.

"Who could believe that the German army coming back to Germakivka would be the beginning of our liberation? This time, thanks God, they was coming from the East, running away from Russia."

The result of Lemelman's labor of love is the real deal: an illustrated memoir which, while technically published as an adult book, will be incredibly approachable, engaging, and memorable to middle school and high school age readers.

Richie Partington

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