Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a quietly terrifying immersion in the experience of Jewish occupants of Poland's Warsaw Ghetto during 1940-42. An English teacher before internment, widower Adam Paskow continues his calling behind the heavily guarded walls. Late one afternoon, a man named Ringelblum, who wants Adam to join an archival project, approaches him in his classroom: "It is up to us to write our own history," he tells Adam. "Deny the Germans the last word."
Adam, Grodstein's narrator, writes journal entries for Ringelblum's project, because "there was no reason not to comply." Having lost his beloved wife four years earlier and now his livelihood, home, and freedom, Adam stumbles through a new life. He helps dispense sparse servings of soup at the Aid Society and, via conversation and poetry, teaches English. He transcribes interviews with his students, and the men, women, and children he lives with. He remembers his wife, waits for liberation, and then begins to understand that it may not come.
Grodstein (The Explanation for Everything; Our Short History) bases her historical novel upon a few real characters and events. Emanuel Ringelblum did oversee an archival project, which provides the background for this realistic, heartrending glimpse into the lives of Jewish occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto. In his detailed recording of other lives and of his own, Adam reveals that love may be found even in the starkest of situations, and he faces the hardest of choices about sacrifice: Who will you save if you can't save them all? --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia