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Tehran Children

A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey

Mikhal Dekel (City College of New York)

$43.95

Hardback

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English
Norton
01 November 2019
The extraordinary true story of Polish-Jewish child refugees who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Iran.

More than a million Jews escaped east from Nazi occupied Poland to Soviet occupied Poland. There they suffered extreme deprivation in Siberian gulags and “Special Settlements” and then, once “liberated,” journeyed to the Soviet Central Asian Republics. The majority of Polish Jews who survived the Nazis outlived the war in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan; some of them continued on to Iran. The story of their suffering, both those who died and those who survived, has rarely been told.

Following the footsteps of her father, one of a thousand refugee children who traveled to Iran and later to Palestine, Dekel fuses memoir with historical investigation in this account of the all-but-unknown Jewish refuge in Muslim lands. Along the way, Dekel reveals the complex global politics behind this journey, discusses refugee aid and hospitality, and traces the making of collective identities that have shaped the postwar world―the histories nations tell and those they forget.

10 illustrations

By:  
Imprint:   Norton
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 244mm,  Width: 165mm,  Spine: 36mm
Weight:   677g
ISBN:   9781324001034
ISBN 10:   1324001038
Pages:   384
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Mikhal Dekel is professor of English at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment and Oedipus in Kishinev.

Reviews for Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey

In this brilliantly conceived narrative, Mikhal Dekel illuminates a series of unexpected places absent from many maps of the refugee experience of the Holocaust. A striking book.--Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World Though their story is seldom told, most Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust did so by taking the road east, into the Soviet Union. In tracing the harrowing journey of her father's escape, Mikhal Dekel provides a multilayered and nuanced account...Her exploration of the peculiar refugee world in 1940s Tehran--especially the tense relations between Jewish- and Catholic-Polish refugees in that city--makes the book an important and timely addition to the literature of the Holocaust and modern refugee history.--Tom Reiss, author of The Orientalist and The Black Count A revelatory history, a saga of flight and welcome, of death and head-down survival, a powerful narrative built for this moment. Dekel's sweeping storytelling is marked by heartbreaking restraint and historical sensitivity.--Charles King, Georgetown University, author of Odessa and Midnight at the Pera Palace Tehran Children is a gripping account of Holocaust survival unlike any other. Blending the genres of memoir, history, and travelogue, Mikhal Dekel combines the empathy of a daughter with the insight of a scholar. This is one of the greatest, largely untold stories of the Second World War.--Tara Zahra, author of Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World


  • Short-listed for Chautauqua Prize 2020
  • Short-listed for National Jewish Book Award 2019
  • Short-listed for Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature 2020

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