Smugglers by Oyzer Warshawsky (Hardcover)

A Novel in Three Parts

Translator: Golda Werman

A Novel in Three Parts deals with a neglected chapter of history the First World War in Poland during the period of the German occupation. The Jews in the Pale of Settlement, mainly small shopkeepers and poor craftsman, suffered from discrimination and persecution under the Russians. When the Germans conquered most of what was once Congress Poland, the Jews had some relief from Russian anti-Semitism, but the economic situation became even more grievous. Famine and typhus were rampant and the economic decline left the poor cobblers, tailors and tradesmen without work and with their meager savings depleted. They were desperate. And then they hit upon a scheme.

Hardcover, 288 pages

Oyzer Warshawsky was born in Sochaczew, Poland, in 1898. He moved to Warsaw as a young man where he began to work on his first novel, Smugglers. The book was published when he was only twenty-one and was an outstanding success, highly acclaimed by the critics and an instant best seller. It went into many editions. His second eagerly awaited novel, Harvest Time, was published in 1926 in Paris where he had made his home. The book disappointed his readers and, crushed by the critics’ cool response, Warshawsky gave up writing novels and became an art critic. In 1941 he fled Nazi-occupied Paris for Marseilles, then escaped to Nice and finally to Rome where his hiding place was discovered by the Gestapo. He was murdered in Auschwitz in May 1944.

Golda Werman was born in Germany, grew up in the United States and now lives in Israel. She is a Milton scholar (author of Milton and Midrash, Catholic University of America Press, 1995) as well as a translator of Yiddish literature. Among her many Yiddish translations are The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Anski, The Stories of David Bergelson: Yiddish Short Fiction from Russia and Strange Ways by Rokhl Faygenberg.