Bashert : A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest
“Bashert is an extraordinary book…. A captivating piece of literature that artfully interlaces the personal story of Andrea and her ancestors with history. Half-way between a detective novel and the tale of a spiritual quest, Andrea keeps us on tenterhooks…. Andrea Simon’s book is all the more important not only to “never forget,” but also to question our certitudes on what, how and why things happened.”
—Dr. Claire Le Foll, Associate Professor of History, University of Southampton, England. From the Foreword.
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Originally published in 2002, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest is still regarded as a groundbreaking book, one of the first personal memoirs to explore Jewish roots in post-Soviet times, the most comprehensive source of primary and secondary material on western Belorussian life in the interwar period and Holocaust, and a forerunner of genealogical research. With the recent discovery at a Brest construction site of 1,214 Jewish victims’ remains, and the ensuing controversy, Bashert is even more timely and essential. Now with a Foreword by Dr. Claire Le Foll of the University of Southampton, Bashert is available in paperback from the venerable Vallentine Mitchell, publisher of the first English language edition of The Diary of a Young Girl.
Haunted by her grandmother’s Old World stories and larger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Using newly translated archival records and witness testimonies, she peeled back layers of clues to confront the mystery. Bashert, the Yiddish word for fated, guided her through a momentous and deeply moving odyssey.
From her grandmother's village of Volchin in present-day Belarus, she followed the trail of the death march taken by the village Jews to the place of their slaughter in 1942. During the same period, in a forest called Brona Gora, some 50,000 Jews were shot. Simon was in one of the first American groups to visit this little-publicized site.
Mass shootings of Jews, particularly in the Soviet Union, have not been addressed with the same focus given to concentration camp atrocities. Yet Simon's research reveals that Nazis killed nearly 50 percent of their Jewish victims by means other than gassing. Thus, Simon fills a significant gap in Holocaust history by providing the most extensive report yet on the executions at Brona Gora and Volchin.
As she interweaves tragic narrative with evocative family anecdotes, Simon writes a story of life in czarist Russia and of her family’s flight from pogroms and persecution. From a unique vantage, Simon’s memoir discloses her dogged genealogical search, the newly perceived Jewish history she uncovered, and the ramifications of the Holocaust in the postwar generation.
PRAISE FOR NEW EDITION:
THE US REVIEW OF BOOKS
book review by Nicole Yurcaba
"Without our stories, we are nothing."
“In this book, readers follow author Simon through an emotional journey to discover the truth about the author’s grandmother and other members of her family. Simon refuses to be thwarted by overlooked and often erased history, as well as a region whose borders constantly changed. Instead, her narrative ventures to Eastern Europe and the town of Volchin, where numerous Jews lived and thrived until mass shootings of Jews in the area left towns like it desolate and empty. Simon’s narrative poignantly recounts the prevalence of these mass shootings, which have not received the same attention and focus as the concentration camps. The book also offers important lessons about self-reckoning, which happens when one individual endeavors to unravel the mysteries inherent in a grandmother’s stories of the past.
A fascinating, well-researched work, the author’s book explores many unique facets of generational trauma, postwar genealogy, and historical and genealogical research. Simon’s work also highlights the difficulty experienced by many Jewish families as they try to reconstruct their familial stories and immigration pathways. Government censorship and records destruction, as well as revisionist history, play a significant part. The author carefully explores the historic motivations for anti-Semitism. Thus, Simon's book is extremely relevant to today’s society, where extremist groups in both the US and Europe have caused a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic incidents. The book stresses the necessity of remembering historical events like the mass shootings which occurred so, as one local woman states in the book, society will “‘never again be like it was before.’” For readers interested in Holocaust history, World War II history, and Jewish history, Simon's book is a powerful read and a strong addition to their reading lists.”
A 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award Legacy Nonfiction Honorale Mention
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Washington Independent Review of Books:
"Andrea Simon’s Bashert marks an important addition to the Holocaust canon.”
“Andrea Simon’s astonishing Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest, first published in 2002 and recently re-released, tells not only the stories of what her research and interviews uncovered, but also — and perhaps more importantly — the story of her determined, compulsive journey to discover the truth about her extended family’s past. Both those who perished and those who survived.
What drove the author? What were her victories and what were her defeats? What kept her going? The memoir dimension of this brave and uplifting book answers these questions and serves as a model for similar projects.
Perhaps all of these confrontations and breakthroughs were fated; that is, meant to be. Such terms are the usual translations of the Yiddish word bashert that titles Simon’s book. Bashert, as well, were dozens of unexpected outcomes of adventures (and misadventures) that wind through the book.
Paramount is the independence and improvisation handed down to the author by her grandmother Masha, whose life seems to be a series of unexpected outcomes. Masha’s journey was a long one: from Volchin — the largely Jewish village of her birth in present-day Belarus — to escaping the death marches, moving to the U.S., then on to Israel and Berlin. Andrea follows her grandmother vicariously and, in her travels, chronicles the trails and trials of her family’s large, segmented odyssey.
Her research shifts the balance within the world of Holocaust history. It is no longer haunted solely by the sorrows and annihilations of Jews from Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Germany itself. The material and cultural landscape is pulled in another direction, taking us to Czarist and Communist Russia and their satellites.
For the Jews who found their way to these places only to run into the Germans’ often successful attempts to absorb them, Bashert is a story not so much of concentration camps and death in the gas chambers, but rather of pogroms and mass shootings at Volchin, Brest, the Brona Gora forest, and elsewhere. Simon discovers, over and over, that there are few innocent bystanders.
Her chapters are numbered, but more crucially, they are given one-word titles that trace the movement from concept to concept: protest, connection, longing, collaboration, isolation, annihilation, response, and survival. These are the steppingstones along a meaningful path that was clearly meant to be.”
—Philip K. Jason is professor emeritus of English at the United States Naval Academy. A former editor of Poet Lore magazine, he is the author or editor of 20 books, including Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture and Don’t Wave Goodbye: The Children’s Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom.
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Praise for the first edition:
“Bashert is the engrossing story of Andrea Simon’s search for her roots, her re-engagement with her grandmother Masha, who journeyed from Volchin to Brooklyn, to Woodridge, to Israel, to Berlin and back. It is the story of the past that once was and never again will be — Volchin, a Jewish town whose population was decimated.... Simon’s writing makes us care about her, her grandmother, her town and her self-discovery. Pilgrimage is the most ancient of religious rituals, a journey forth that is also a journey into self and Bashert is an admirable account of Simon’s pilgrimage. We learn as she learns, we engage, we remember, we cry out and we even at times laugh. Perhaps the first — or at least one of the first — of a new genre of Holocaust writing that will become more familiar and more urgent as the survivors are no longer with us and their descendants are forced to uncover from history what they once could encounter directly from memory.”
—Michael Berenbaum, Director, Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust and Professor of Jewish Studies, American Jewish University, Los Angeles, California; former President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
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“Makes a significant contribution to our understanding and perception of the Holocaust in eastern Poland (Belarus).... Balances impressions of life before and during the Holocaust in eastern Poland with other fragments of family life in the U.S. and other parts of the world from roughly 1915 to the present day. This has the welcome effect of demonstrating the quality, beauty and despair of those lives that were destroyed.... The very personal approach and the attempt to reconstruct fragments of the quality of life ... give it a special and enduring quality.”
—Martin Dean, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
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“Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest delivers something much more than a story about the author’s kin. It carries a message that transcends all cultures, races and generations.... Ms. Simon’s memoir whispers a warning to all who read it: do not let the past become the future.”
—Melanie McMillan, The Litchfield County Times
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“Bashert is an emotional roller-coaster ride. I laughed heartily at some of the family anecdotes, and I cried bitterly at the description of the horrific executions of innocent men, women and children whose only crime was being Jewish. I kvelled with Andrea when I learned of her family’s bravery and courage...and I mourned the senseless loss of so many loved ones. Bashert is essential reading.... While we are all aware of the horrifying misery that confronted Jews and other minorities in the concentration camps...much of what occurred in the smaller and often unknown villages inside Czarist Russia remains unreported. Bashert opens our eyes to the personal story of a strong and determined young woman, who lost her home and family...and found a new life in America. Masha will take a place in your heart as she did in her granddaughter’s and mine and create a pocket of warmth and pride that will forever remind you of how the strength of one person can change the destiny of an entire family. I urge you to read Bashert, but please be sure to have a hanky at hand.”
—Michael D. Fein, editor, The Gantseh Megillah
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