Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey
Mikhal Dekel
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey
Mikhal Dekel
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rejecting the binary of victim and perpetrator, Dekel finds complexity in relationships shaped by changing material conditions as well as prejudice. Encountering a succession of guides, hosts and witnesses, reliable and less so, she explores the lingering traces—and denial—of the past in the present.
As much as Tehran Children depicts the twists and turns of the author’s discovery of her father’s life story and the reasons for his lifelong silence about his past, it also narrates in great detail her own pathway of self-discovery.
The backstory about how Dekel, now a professor of comparative literature in the U.S., began researching this project with an Iranian colleague, adds an interesting personal aspect to this work of excellent scholarship and a harrowing history illuminating both the specifics of the past and the universal aspects of the refugee experience..