HarperCollins
September 2011
On Sale: September 1, 2011
368 pages ISBN: 0061881775 EAN: 9780061881770 Kindle: B003V1WVZ2 Trade Size / e-Book Add to Wish List
Moving from the Allied zones of postwar Germany to New York
City, an astonishing novel of grief and anger, memory and
survival witnessed through the experiences of "displaced
persons" struggling to remake their lives in the decades
after World War II In May 1945, Pavel Mandl, a Polish Jew
recently liberated from a concentration camp, lands near a
displaced persons camp in the British occupation zone of
newly defeated Germany. Alone, possessing nothing but a map,
a few tins of food, a toothbrush, and his identity papers,
he must scrape together a new life in a chaotic community of
refugees, civilians, and soldiers. Gifted with a talent for
black-market trading, Pavel soon procures clothing, false
documents, and a modest house, where he installs himself and
a pair of fellow refugees—Fela, a young widow who fled
Poland for Russia at the outset of the war, and Chaim, a
resourceful teenage boy whose smuggling skills have brought
him to the Western zones. The trio soon form a makeshift
family, searching for surviving relatives, railing against
their circumscribed existence, and dreaming of visas to
America. Fifteen years later, haunted by decisions they made
as "DPs," Pavel and Fela are married and living in Queens
with their young son and daughter, and Chaim has recently
emigrated from Israel with his wife, Sima. Pavel opens a
small tailoring shop with his scheming brother-in-law while
Fela struggles to establish peace in a loosely traditional
household; Chaim and Sima adapt cheerfully to American life
and its promise of freedom from a brutal past. Their lives
are no longer dominated by the need to endure, fight, hide,
or escape. Instead, they grapple with past trauma in
everyday moments: taking the children to the municipal pool,
shopping for liquor, arguing with landlords. For decades,
Pavel, Fela, and Chaim battle over memory and identity on
the sly, within private groups of survivors. But as the Iron
Curtain falls in the 1990s, American society starts to
embrace the tragedy as a cultural commodity, and survivor
politics go public. Clever and stubborn, tyrannical and
generous, Pavel, Fela, and Chaim articulate the self-
conscious strivings of an immigrant community determined to
write its own history, on its own terms. In Displaced
Persons, Ghita Schwarz reveals the interior despairs and
joys of immigrants shaped by war—ordinary men and women who
have lived through cataclysmic times—and illuminates
changing cultural understandings of trauma and remembrance.
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