Ostrich Feathers by Miriam Romm (Paperback)

A baby girl is born in the middle of the Second World War, and survives in a miraculous way thanks to the determination of her mother and the good heartedness of simple people.

An Israeli woman abandons her protected life and goes for a quest in the trail of her father, whom she has not recognized. An old Polish man that she meets in Krakow, is contributory to her research, and maybe actually complicates it.

A touching, thrilling book that interlaces universal origins: the unbreakable relations between past and present , between Jewish and Israel characteristics, between parents and their children and vice-versa. It teaches a valuable lesson of victory of the optimism on the laxity of the spirit and hopelessness.

"My first journey to Krakow in 2000 had unexpectedly changed my life. I had journeyed there to search for traces of my father and his family, about whom I knew nothing. In Krakow, I followed the ghostly tracks and fragments of memories left behind by my father - a quest that resulted in a great gift, the revival of a new, warm family."
Miriam Romm

Paperback, 278 pages

Reviews:

Ostrich Feathers is the story of Miriam Romm's search for her father, Moshe (Moniek) Grajower, who disappeared after being arrested and turned over to the Gestapo at the border between Hungary and Slovakia during the spring of 1944. This moving book relates a very personal story, and yet it carries a broader significance in relation to the Israeli and Jewish reality of our times. This is a story of closure. Not only does it reveal to us the fascinating, breathtaking story of Miriam Romm's success in her difficult, complex, almost impossible mission to find her lost father, it also illustrates various aspects of life in Israel for the European Jews whom the Holocaust had uprooted from their homes in Europe- and their children.

Miriam-Maria-Hedvika-Grajower-Gajewski was born on November 30, 1944 in Lubela, Slovakia while her mother, Leah-Lonka Grajower nee Haber, was in hiding in the house of a Catholic farming family. Her parents had wed a year earlier, after falling in love in Ghetto Bochnia, 50 kilometers East of Krakow. After the Nazi conquest of Hungary, where the two had been living, they decided to attempt a return to Slovakia. It was then that Moniek was captured and apparently murdered by the Nazis. Miriam and her mother lived in Mikulash until 1948 when they left for Paris. They lived in France until immigrating to Israel in late 1949 aboard the Negba. In 1950, Miriam's mother married Maximilian-Meshulam (Tonio) Lemm, a Polish Jew who had himself illegally immigrated to Israel aboard the Sakaria and who had lost his entire family during the Holocaust. Tonio adopted Miriam and raised her as his own daughter. In 1952, her sister, Nava, was born.

I read this entire book in one breath. It is a truly moving story and I strongly recommend it. But this isn't the only reason I chose to write about it. Ostrich Feathers is an extremely Zionist book. And it is Zionist despite the fact that Miriam convinces her mother, during the course of her search, to help her obtain a Polish passport- yet another expression of her growing propinquity to the country and the culture that her father had never left, the same culture which she somehow feels a part of despite the fact she has lived her whole life in Israel. Paradoxically, Miriam was able to choose to be a Polish citizen specifically because she and her family are Jews who consider Israel to be their home. Her mother had contemptuously thrown out her Polish passport and yet her mindset had in many ways remained Polish. With Miriam the opposite had occurred. Her state of mind is Israeli. Her longing is for the landscape of her mother's and father's homeland in Poland