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"Moshe's Children presents the inspiring story of Moshe Zeiri, a Jewish carpenter responsible for rescuing hundreds of Jewish refugee children who had survived the Final Solution. During the liberation of Italy, Zeiri, a volunteer in the British Army in Italy, assumed responsibility for and vowed to help around seven hundred Polish, Hungarian, Russian, and Romanian children. Although these orphans of the Shoah had been deprived of a family, a home, and a language and were irreparably robbed of their past, they were able to rebuild their lives through Zeiri's efforts as he founded the largest Jewish orphanage in postwar Europe in Selvino, Italy, where he began to rehabilitate the orphans and to teach them how to become citizens of the new nation of Israel. Moshe's Children also explores Zeiri's own story from birth in a shtetl to his upbringing and Zionist education, his journey to the Land of Israel, and his work there before the war. With narrative verve and scholarly acumen, Sergio Luzzatto brilliantly tells the gripping stories of these orphans of the Holocaust and the good man who helped point them to a real future"--
List of contents
Main Characters
Acknowledgments
Maps
The Black Box
1. Far from Where
2. Yehudit
3. Close to Where
4. Anabasis
5. The Drowned and the Saved
6. The House of Mussolini
7. A Republic of Orphans
8. Life after Death
9. Kibbutz Selvino?
10. In Israel's Waters
11. The Road to Jerusalem
12. If You Survive
Glossary
Notes
Index
About the author
Sergio Luzzatto is Professor and the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History at University of Connecticut. Three of his books on Italian history,
The Body of Il Duce,
Padre Pio, and
Primo Levi's Resistance, have been translated into English.
Stash Luczkiw is a New York-born poet and translator based in Italy.
