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Critically praised, beloved by readers, In the Land of Armadillos has an evocative new cover and title, They Were Like Family to Me. Now in Paperback! Available October 4.
1942.
With the Nazi Party at the height of its power, the occupying army empties
Poland's towns and cities of their Jewish citizens. As neighbor turns on
neighbor and survival often demands unthinkable choices, Poland has become a
moral quagmire—a place of shifting truths and blinding ambiguities.
Blending
folklore and fact, Helen Maryles Shankman shows us the people of Wlodawa, a
remote Polish town. We meet a cold-blooded SS officer dedicated to rescuing the
Jewish creator of his son's favorite picture book; a Messiah who appears in a
little boy's bedroom to announce that he is quitting; a young Jewish girl who
is hidden by the town's most outspoken anti-Semite—and his talking dog. And
walking among these tales are two unforgettable figures: silver-tongued Willy
Reinhart, commandant of the forced labor camp who has grand schemes to protect
"his" Jews, and Soroka, the Jewish saddlemaker, struggling to
survive.
Channeling the mythic magic of classic storytellers like Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer and the psychological acuity of modern-day masters like Nicole Krauss and Nathan Englander, They Were Like Family to Me is a testament to the persistence of humanity in the most inhuman conditions.
Channeling the mythic magic of classic storytellers like Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer and the psychological acuity of modern-day masters like Nicole Krauss and Nathan Englander, They Were Like Family to Me is a testament to the persistence of humanity in the most inhuman conditions.
“One of the most original and consistently captivating short
story collections to have appeared in recent years…(They Were Like Family to Me)
is a singularly inventive collection of chilling stark
realism enhanced by the hallucinatory ingredient of top-drawer magical realism,
interrogating the value of art, storytelling, and dreams in a time of peril and
presenting hard truths with wisdom, magic, and grace.” —Jewish
Book Council
“Moving and unsettling…Like Joyce's Dubliners, this book circles the same streets and encounters the same people as it depicts the horrors of Germany's invasion of Poland through the microcosm of one village…Shankman's prose is inventive and taut… A deeply humane demonstration of wringing art from catastrophe.” —Kirkus Reviews
“...by turns forthright and tender, oblique and intimate,
brutal and ethereal…Though each story stands beautifully on its own, it is the
completed tapestry of interwoven details that finally reveals the entire
picture and provides the full emotional depth of the collected stories…The
author’s greatest accomplishment is in leaving the horror to speak for itself,
and instead giving voice to the enchantment.” —Historical
Novel Society
.
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About Helen Maryles Shankman
She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Color of Light and the story collection They Were Like Family to Me. She lives in New Jersey, with her husband and four children.
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