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Thought-provoking, tender, and horrifying, this memorable novel of Jewish lives in the Warsaw Ghetto offers timeless lessons.

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, also 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, sharing an apartment with 10 occupants in two families–all previously strangers to each other. He helps dispense sparse servings of soup at the Aid Society and, via conversation and poetry, teaches English. He slowly sells off his wife’s fine linen sheets, silk pillowcases, and shoes. He transcribes interviews with his students, and the men, women, and children he lives with. New relationships form. He remembers his wife, waits for liberation, and then begins to understand that it may not come.

Prior to the Nazis’ invasion of Poland, Adam was non-practicing (“I had barely remembered I was a Jew”) and married to a wealthy non-Jewish woman; her mother’s rejection of him and her father’s demonstrative tolerance and proclaimed support highlight differences that the younger couple find insignificant. Adam calls himself a coward, but the honesty with which he bears witness is striking. His journal entries vary from the chapters that come between them; the direct first-person narration of the latter takes a more personal tone, but in both cases, Adam shares an unvarnished view of individual characters in all their complexities, never relying on easy labels. Adam, who teaches multiple languages, loves language in general, and Grodstein gives him a beautiful writing voice.

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. We Must Not Think of Ourselves brings a horrifying chapter of history to readers with intimate, detailed portraits. 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?

This review originally ran in the October 5, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

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