Mom, They Won't Kill Us

Memoir prose of the son of an Odessa attorney, whose earliest memories of the narrator were pre-war Odessa and the peculiar—and already lost—culture of intellectual life of that time; then came the war, during which the boy learns what it means to be Jewish; attempts of the family to survive during the occupation—when the boy begs his mother that “they won’t kill us,” but the mother is killed (the father, like many others around them, was repressed after the war). The narrative ends in 1945, when the narrator turns eight years old. In other words, this is a story about childhood—and precisely a story, with lived experience in the text and reflection on what is portrayed—not a witness testimony.