Star Children (English and Dutch Edition) - Hardcover

Asscher-Pinkhof, Clara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814318460 ISBN 13: 9780814318461

Publisher: Wayne State University Press, 1986

Synopsis

Clara Asscher- Pinkhof had a dream in 1943: "Star Children. The children with the Jewish star. They went past me, the star children that I had known and knew in the critical times in the city and in the theater which was their prison. The dead children and the living. I knew at that moment that I had to be their voice-that I had to speak out and say what they had felt and suffered!' In these sixty-eight short stories, she is indeed their voice.

In Amsterdam, Star City, there is Star House, the detention center in
which the children and their elders are herded. Westerbork, the transit
camp to which they are shipped, becomes Star Desert and, at the end
of the railway line, Star Hell-Bergen- Belsen. It is in this world of death and despair that the star children make their way. At the end, there are only a handful left to tear off their stars, from among "crowds of star children who did not live long and happily, whose stars were torn off by God himself and placed among the other stars in the heavens, as eternal evidence!'

Though the stories and their narrator are the author's creation, the book explores a new kind of realism in Holocaust literature.

About this title

Book Description:

N/A

About the Author:

A widow at thirty, Clara Asscher-Pinkhof supported herself and her six
children by writing children's books and teaching. Her first novel appeared in 1935, followed by three others. She also began translating children's books from English into Dutch.

Marked for deportation in 1943, she entrusted the first half of this
book to her publisher, Vowing to finish it if she survived the war. In 1944, she was sent from Bergen-Belsen to Palestine in a prisoner exchange and completed the manuscript. It was published in Holland in 1946, and subsequently has been translated into several languages. This is the first English edition.

Her autobiography Danseres zonder Benen (Dancer without Legs) was
published in 1966. Clara Asscher- Pinkhof died in Israel in 1984.

In 1980, Terese Edelstein, an American music teacher, met Inez Smidt, a Dutch physician, in Leiden. A shared love for the book prompted their decision to collaborate on this translation.

Harry James Cargas, of Webster University, is associate editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0814318460
• ISBN 13: 9780814318461
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268