His main characters are Isaac Zuckerman, the
24-year-old co-founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization; Simha Ratheiser, a
teenager who became Zuckerman's bodyguard and lead courier; and Zivia Lubetkin,
the highest ranking woman in the Jewish Fighting Organization (and later Zuckerman's
wife). Against immense odds, they all eventually made it to Israel. Their
stories of resistance gathered in meticulous detail give Isaac's Army
texture and context that is especially compelling as the last of the Holocaust
generation passes away. Brzezinski's book has been called "as moving and
powerful as any novel" (Kirkus Reviews),
"taut and worthy' (Publishers Weekly)
and "admirable" (Wall Street Journal).
But for me, Isaac's Army is much more than a
fine book. Only when it was published did I learn (from my brother, who had
been interviewed for the book) that one of its narrative lines describes how my
father, mother, and brother, with remarkable wiles and guiles, managed to flee
Poland after the swift Nazi takeover. Eventually, crossing from Romania,
through Turkey and Iraq, they made it to Bombay, India, where I was born in
1943. They immigrated to the United States in early 1944, crossing the very
dangerous Pacific on a troop ship with wounded GIs, Italian POWs, and 120
civilians. Nearly all of their amazing story -- my parents were in their late thirties
and my brother still a child -- unfolded before I existed, and to read it within
the broader canvas of the epic Polish-Jewish tragedy of the war gives it an
impact that is exceptionally strong. Brzezinski also includes my mother's
cousins, the Mortkowicz family, three generations of what he calls "Poland's
greatest publishing dynasty." These three women were often hidden among
Gentiles and nuns, and stayed in Poland through the Soviet era. Joanna Olczak-Mortkowicz
wrote a superb book of her own, In the Garden of Memory, which received
Poland's top literary prize in the 1990s (and was published in Britain by
Weidenfeld and Nicholson).
Of course, over time I came to know much of what my
family had endured and accomplished in those years before I was born, and my
mother and brother wrote their recollections in a memoir published privately.
But as a prodigious reporter and skilled writer, Brzezinski's account gives
greater depth and insight to their saga of ingenuity and luck, as he does
throughout for the stories of those whose courageous choice was to resist. More
than 70 years after the fact, is it astonishing to realize again the obstacles
my parents overcame. After the Polish army was defeated, my father had made it
to Bucharest where, miraculously, he obtained exit visas for my mother and
brother. It was late spring of 1940 when, in order to travel on a train -- since
Jews could not -- my mother went to "a small private chapel, where in exchange for
a few zlotys (Polish currency), Martha was sprinkled with holy water and
baptized Irene."