Refugee: A Kind of Jewish Childhood by Joe Rich

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Interior and binding are still very good.

In the 1930s, many children fled the rising menace of Nazism in Europe. This book is the story of one such who with his parents left Berlin in February 1939 to make his way to Sydney where, although welcomed by some, they attracted the hostility of many others who saw such immigrants as a threat to Australia's relatively homogeneous culture and, during the war with Germany, distrusted them as enemy aliens.

With the return of peace in 1945, this distrust morphed into a tide of anti-Semitism as Australians, whose patriotism was still at that time strongly tinged with immense pride in their British origins, learned of the lethal attacks on British servicemen, who had fought against Hitler, by Zionist insurgents prepared to stop at nothing in their resolve to carve out a Jewish state in Palestine.

Interwoven with these experiences are the unique, more personal elements of the equation, as this ill-matched and increasingly dysfunctional trio struggled to re-establish itself firstly in the alien environment of a large Australian city and then in the isolation of a Victorian country town. (back cover)