Word: blackstock
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CHILDREN by Charity Blackstock. 240 pages. Little, Brown...
...Warsaw's ghetto, across Europe, to safety in a French Jewish orphanage. She was also one among thousands of Jewish children who survived the Nazis only to find themselves displaced and placeless in the wreckage of postwar Europe. They seemed anything but superfluous to British Novelist Charity Blackstock (Mr. Christopoulos, Monkey on a Chain). Working through a British Jewish relief agency, Mrs. Blackstock brought about 500 Jewish adolescents to England, installed them for brief holidays in Jewish homes. She enjoyed her work so much that when agency funds ran out after five years, she went to France to work...
This brisk, absorbing account of her experiences is anything but the sentimental memoir of sweet Charity. The children were often neurotic and always rebellious of any authority. German Jews looked down on Polish Jews; Orthodox Jews looked down on liberal Jews; French Jews looked down on everyone. Author Blackstock even had to fight antiChristianism among her Jewish confreres, who warily wondered why a goy should take an interest in their problems. She may have wondered herself when one orphanage director asked her, on Christmas Eve, to address the children on the meaning of Christmas, and then followed her talk with...
What readers will find most fascinating in the book is Author Blackstock's self-portrait of Charity as philanthropist: stubborn, ironic, protective as a brooding swan, and absolutely unreconciled to old injustices. "I know in my mind," she writes, "that it is absurd, obscene and evil to hate a people, it is a form of genocide, it has no basis in reality. And yet when I think of the Germans, a vision comes before my eyes of still, unsmiling faces, branded wrists, a hysterical girl, screaming for her dead mother. And then, in defiance of my upbringing, my training...