The Train to Warsaw
A Novel
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2.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Two Holocaust survivors, now married, return to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto they fled forty years ago in this “riveting, dream-like” novel (The New York Times Book Review).
In 1942, Jascha and Lilka separately fled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Reunited years later, they now live in London where Jascha has become a celebrated writer, feted for his dark tales about his wartime adventures. Forty years after the war, Jascha receives a letter inviting him to give a reading in Warsaw. He tells Lilka that nothing remains of the city they knew and that wild horses couldn’t drag him back.
Lilka, however, is nostalgic for the city of her childhood and manages to change Jascha’s mind. Together, traveling by train through a frozen December landscape, they return to the city of their youth. When they unwittingly find themselves back in what was once the ghetto, they will discover that they still have secrets between them as well as an inescapable past.
“With quiet but devastating force, Edelman plays the experience of being closed in—to trauma, to the past, to a ghetto—against the experience of being forever cast out.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A compelling tale told by two lovers, whose stunning, sometimes shocking dialogue ultimately becomes an exploration of the enduring wounds of the Holocaust, the mystery of memory, and the irresolvable traumas of lived experience.” —Haaretz (Israel)
“A powerful and moving novel that is both disturbing and exhilarating.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
“A well-crafted study of exile and return.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edelman's second novel (after War Story) is a tale of the Holocaust's lingering wounds, told in polished prose of distilled intensity. After fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto, Jascha, a Polish Jew, settles in London and finds success with a critically lauded memoir, The Way Down. Yet his wife, Lilka, another Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland, never feels at home: "Even after forty years, London is as alien to me as the other side of the moon." When they are invited back to Warsaw for Jascha to give a reading, Lilka considers their return a homecoming, while Jascha does not, saying "God knows why we are going... didn't we have enough?" Jascha and Lilka must confront the melancholy alienness of their onetime home, where they find themselves lost in once-familiar streets, and Lilka is made to feel like an outsider by residents who compliment her on her excellent Polish. At the reading, Jascha focuses on his work's most challenging moments, prompting walkouts from an audience whose members are still unable to reckon with their past. Afterward, the couple continues to re-explore the city, all the while working backward into their separate histories, until their stories meet, and they learn that some old truths still have the power to shock, even after 40 years. Edelman has written a well-crafted study of exile and return whose depth exceeds its length.
