The Jew

About the Book

The book is based on real-life events that took place in the historically pivotal years 1967–1969 amid widespread students’ protests in Europe and America, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War at its height, and sociopolitical turmoil in Poland, resulting in several thousand Jews fleeing the country. It’s a deeply personal and harrowing survival story of a Jewish teenager, Alek, and his mother, Zofia Brodski, in a small, isolated, and backward community in a communist totalitarian state amid discrimination, prejudice, and rampant poverty. Peoples’ lives are at the mercy of communist bureaucrats, the state police, the pervading presence of the Catholic Church, and the insane Marxist-Leninist ideology when lies became the truth and the prevailing doctrine. It all culminates in an incredible and most unusual conclusion. For some inexplicable reason, the author happened to be “in the right place at the right time” when many of the events took place.

About the Author

About the Author: Born in 1956 and raised in Poland, in a small town near the border with the Soviet Union, where the action of the book takes place, and had lived there until the age of fifteen. The family was soon broken up and dispersed when his parents left the country, leaving three sons behind. The remaining years he spent in the provincial capital, Lublin, where he joined his older brother and extended family members already residing there. His younger brother was left under their aunt’s care in the western part of the country. In the late seventies, the three brothers immigrated to Canada to join their parents, who had left Poland four years before. They settled permanently in Edmonton, Alberta. In the late eighties, he moved to the metro Vancouver, British Columbia area, where he resides till this day. The author has a lifelong passion for the arts and literature.