Imagine that it is 1940. You are a Jewish boy or girl living in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or some other large American city. Your parents, or perhaps your grandparents, weren’t born in the United States, but are immigrants from Eastern Europe. They came to America from such countries as Russia, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, or Hungary. Your parents and grandparents didn’t grow up speaking English. Instead, their native tongue was Yiddish, a Jewish language then used by millions of Jews across Europe. There, your family spoke Yiddish at home and with other Jews in the towns where they grew up. They might also have gone to schools where they were taught the same subjects you study in school—history, mathematics, literature—in Yiddish.
Here in the United States, you go to a public school where you speak English during the day. But on afternoons and weekends you go to another school, where you learn to speak Yiddish. At this school you learn to sing folksongs in Yiddish and read stories in Yiddish about Jewish history and customs. At home you sometimes speak Yiddish with your parents, grandparents, and other relatives, and you might look at Yiddish newspapers or listen to Yiddish broadcasts on the radio with them.
These days your family is very troubled by news about what has been happening in Europe, especially to their families and friends living there. For years, Jews living in Germany have suffered from the persecutions of the Nazi regime, led by a dictator named Adolf Hitler. More recently, Nazi Germany occupied other countries—Austria and part of Czechoslovakia—where they have also made life especially hard for Jews. Then, in September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and a terrible war broke out across Europe. The situation is very grim for Jews and other people persecuted by the Nazis; their future is unclear.
One day, your teacher at the Yiddish school presents you and your classmates with a new book. It is different from the other Yiddish books you have been reading there. The new book tells a story about events that took place very recently, just months before the war in Europe began. The story isn’t about dictators or armies. It’s about two boys who are about the same age as you. The book describes what it is like to live in a place that is about to go to war, a place where ordinary people’s lives are already being disrupted. Families are broken up, and many of them are losing their homes. People are being beaten and arrested. They aren’t free to live as they wish or even to speak their minds, especially if they disagree with the government. Sometimes it is dangerous simply being who you are—or who other people think you are.
This is a translation of that book. In 1940, it asked Jewish children living in America to imagine what it would be like to face the challenges of life under Nazi occupation, on the eve of a war that had just begun and whose terrible course was then unforeseeable. The book called on its young readers to consider the physical, social, and moral challenges that Europe’s Jews and other people in danger there faced. The book also asked its readers to think how, even though they were still children, they might understand what was happening far away from America and how they might realize its importance to their own lives—as Jews, as Americans, and as human beings.
Now, this book asks you to do the same.
J.S.