A Jewish author recalls his childhood in the small 'shetl' of Barovke, Latvia. "I lived the life of Huckleberry Finn, fishing in the streams, swimming in the lakes, playing in the woods, running in the meadows under the great, open east European skies, and when we finally left for Scotland I felt as if I had been expelled from paradise..."
Yet set against the fun and the closeness of a Jewish community came the strictures of life as a rabbi's son (father combined his profession with that of a ritual slaughterman, and his son memorably recalls him walking through the forest "to cut a few throats and give private tuition to one or two boys") ...the hours of study of the scriptures, the sense that his father's occupation meant he was an outsider. for fear of him cramping their style.

Of course the piquancy of the whole work comes from the reader's awareness that most of the characters so memorably described will soon be caught up in the Holocaust...the fellow 'gang' members, the kindly neighbours, the good and the flawed. While Bermant includes a selection of b/w photos, they are just faces looking out, more of the millions of victims...but brought to life as real people in his book.

Bermant's father took the family to Glasgow shortly before the situation worsened; seen off at the bus stop by the whole village, he recalls looking back..."they looked small and forlorn as they stood there waving their hands in the morning mist."

In the epilogue, the now elderly Bermant managed to re-establish contact with a few survivors of the village, now living in Israel. Sadly he died before completing his work, and the final part is writtenb by his four children, recalling their father and trying to pull some sort of documentary evidence of the villagers' fates from his notes.
Very moving work. ( )

Acquired 2022