Description: This novel details the experience of the Jewish community in Warsaw between 1940 and 1942; the final chapters take place during the mass deportation of Warsaw's Jewish community to death camps. Episodic, chaotic as the teeming ghetto itself, Wojdowski records the inexorable breakdown of morals and loyalties that accompanied the physical deterioration of the ghetto population.

For the children smuggling it across the ghetto walls, bread is the main subject of daily life -- more important than life -- and Wojdowski, who was in the ghetto from age ten to age twelve, depicts how the children adapt to their changed circumstances. Fulfilling the animal function of obtaining food every day, the children known as "rats" develop appropriate instincts. The progressive and deliberate diminution of human life makes the ghetto physician's rhetorical question "When does a man cease to be a man?" resonate in both the moral and physical senses. Wojdowski relates this story in a complex and ingenious mixture of standard Polish, slang, thieves' argot, Yiddish, and Hebrew, beautifully rendered in Madeline G. Levine's fluid translation. This first English translation includes a moving foreword by Henryk Grynberg, also a Holocaust survivor.

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