Livia Bitton-Jackson’s Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor's Journey Home to Reclaim Her Ancestry chronicles the author’s efforts to exhume her maternal grandparent’s bones from a small town in Slovakia during the cold war. Readers are treated to a compelling story as Bitton-Jackon's and her husband maneuver through the byzantine, legalistic (and corrupt) Czechoslovakian bureaucracy to obtain approval to exhume and ship the remains.
There is not a Chevra Kadisha, a Jewish burial society, nearby, so the author and her husband must exhume the remains themselves. This scene is written with pathos and strain. Eventually, the remains are re-interred in Jerusalem.
Bitton-Jackson, a teen during the holocaust, is definitely a product of two worlds. She speaks Hungarian, German, Slovak, English and Hebrew. This is an excellent book exposing a fault line in Jewish history at a living moment in the events of one family – at a gap where two worlds meet.
There is not a Chevra Kadisha, a Jewish burial society, nearby, so the author and her husband must exhume the remains themselves. This scene is written with pathos and strain. Eventually, the remains are re-interred in Jerusalem.
Bitton-Jackson, a teen during the holocaust, is definitely a product of two worlds. She speaks Hungarian, German, Slovak, English and Hebrew. This is an excellent book exposing a fault line in Jewish history at a living moment in the events of one family – at a gap where two worlds meet.
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