Into the Forest

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Il y a, entre ces lignes, tellement de beauté, de sensualité et d’amour qu’il est difficile de trouver les mots pour l’exprimer. Si vous lisez le grand roman de Jean Hegland, vous serez enchanté : C’est la plus belle promesse littéraire de ce début d’année. This beautifully written story captures the essential nature of the sister bond: the fierce struggle to be true to one’s own self, only to learn that true strength comes from what they are able to share together.” —Carol Saline, co-author of Sisters Lauren devoured it in one sitting. I did the same, but in my case it turned into more wanting to get it over with so I can start another book if and when they finally arrive in the mail.

Set in the northern Californian forest in the near-future, Into the Forest focuses on the relationship between two isolated teenaged sisters as they struggle to survive the collapse of society.

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Rebecca Frankel’s connection to the family and desire to tell their story is what attracted me to this book. The writing and piecing together from interviews and research kept me reading. The author’s note at the end along with recorded interviews on the audio book made this an immediate buy and keep forever book for me. Masterful! This is a story about the Rabinowitz family and their escape away from Nazi soldiers trying to expunge Jews and into the forest where survival was unlikely. The story is compelling and horrific. Set in one of the world's last remaining primeval forests, this story of horror and heroism has the trappings of a grim fairy tale: Once upon a terrible time, after so much loss and devastation, one unlikely couple found their happily ever after." The day Miriam Dworetsky finally chose an eligible suitor from a good Jewish family must have come as no small relief to her father, Gutel Dworetsky, who had himself been a widower for more than two decades. His wife, Rochel, died during labor with their fourth child. Delivery complications claimed the lives of both mother and baby, leaving Gutel, who was still a relatively young man in 1913, with three small children—Miriam, five; a son, Beryl, three; and finally Luba, who was just one.

The Rabinowitz family's struggles both during and after WWII are both astounding and inspiring. The persecution and slaughter of innocent people is, as always, mindboggling. If I didn't know any better, I would say that this book is fiction, but it's not. Over the years many books and memoirs have been written describing the imponderable experiences of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. The story line that I have found most unbelievable involves those individuals who escaped the Nazi imposed ghettoization of villages, towns, and cities into forests that adjoined their homes. The latest narrative, INTO THE FOREST: A HOLOCAUST STORY OF SURVIVAL, TRIUMPH AND LOVE by Rebecca Frankel is a poignant description of eight hundred people who escaped the Belorussian village of Zhetel in August 1942 into the Lipiczany forest who by August 1944 was reduced to about two hundred. The resistance/survival genre of the Holocaust was popularized in the 1980s with the publication of the book DEFIANCE and a film of the same name which told the true story of the Bielski brothers who defied the Nazis, built a village in the forest, and saved about 1200 Jews. These stories reflect the tenacity and will to live by so many as is shown in Frankel’s description of the plight of the Rabinowitz family as they survived in a primeval forest near their home.Comme si c’était si simple, comme si ça n’était pas une idée dévastatrice et dangereuse de laisser croire qu’il existe des incestes heureux, inoffensifs, joyeux. Une bonne mère révélée par la naissance de son bébé, deux femmes sauvages et libres qui partent affronter le monde avec leur petit garçon sous le bras…

Overall, I never got a true sense of how far they had to travel while they were hiding out or how they obtained food to eat for so many people, day after day, for the two years that they spent in the woods. There are also a lot of Polish and Jewish names of people and places in the information that were sometimes hard to grasp.

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As the fetus grows in her belly, Eva recognizes that it will be its own person someday, which grants it certain unalienable rights. As such, it deserves a chance in the world. Coming to terms with this, Eva also realizes that the world her child will enter is not the world she and her sister once knew and loved. And so, they best prepare themselves and the coming child for life in this new reality and stop wishing the world would return to what it once was.

Into the Forest is a nonfiction book about the Rabinowitz family living in Zhetel, in what is now Belarus. It's an astonishing tale of hardship, survival, and, in the end, love. Hard to put down... A tragic, yet uplifting, tale of human fortitude and love that needs to be told and widely read.”Eli? You batted your lashes at this boy for a hot minute over a flask in a shady square and all of a sudden you're pining for him? Bish please. He just randomly hikes out to your house? Swipes your v-card and then you continue the dirty but magically don't get pregnant? You're willing to hike across the country for this fool and leave your sister behind all alone? Nell needs a hi-5. In the face. With a chair. In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods―through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids―until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. By the start of 1944, the 150,000 Russian partisans had taken control of the forests and the Soviet army began its march toward Berlin. The Jews who lived in the forest had to navigate being caught between the surging Russian forces and the retreating Germans. By September of 1944, the Rabinowitz’s and others were told by the Christian farmers that the Germans were gone, and they soon walked for weeks to return to the village of Zhetel which they found was occupied by the Soviet army and their homes and possessions gone.