Once They Had a Country

 
‘Once They Had a Country is based on thoughtful research and scholarship, and attempts to speak to larger issues from the vantage point of an intimate family case study. The manuscript draws on letters and memories to provide to the reader a clear sense of the mounting danger that peaked for the protagonists. It makes clear that the international refugee regime that has come into existence since the 1950s, and which prevents refoulement of refugees with a well-founded fear of persecution to the places from which they came, was not in place during World War II.’ —Kenneth Waltzer, Director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University

Gillick’s story is remarkable....Gillick has done prodigious research to amplify her parents’ experience and understand it in broader historical context. She gives a rich account of German-Jewish life in the Weimar and early Nazi period to situate the stories of her parents and their respective families. The personal saga of each protagonist in the story becomes the occasion for a deft historical account of the context of that saga....One might expect that a daughter writing her parents’ stories would skirt around difficult personal details or turn her protagonists into unblemished heroes. But Gillick is unflinching....Of course, not all children of survivors are able to strike such an objective stance in writing about their parents, but Gillick may well have profited from waiting so long to tell the story of hers. Gillick...represent[s] the passionate desire of writers born since the Shoah to try to enter into the experience and understand it, although with the awareness that what one has not experienced oneself can never be fully understood (and perhaps even those who did go through the Holocaust can never fully understand it, either). The tools of historical research — objective detachment and use of documentary sources — are what distinguish [this memoir] from those written by earlier authors telling their own stories. It is examples like [Gillick's] that make one optimistic about a Holocaust literature beyond the survivors.' --David Biale, professor of Jewish history at the University of California-Davis, and author of Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, in The Forward

Th[is] book is stunning. For starters, of course, it is simply a terrific story, but what makes it a marvel is the way the author paces the account and weaves the various threads together to create a rich, contrapuntal texture. Time and again while reading Once They Had a Country I experienced the same delight I get from one of my favorite novelists, John le Carré. Besides meeting two intrepid, resourceful people whose fraught narratives were finally tied together at their marriage in Central Park in 1948, you will learn things you probably didn’t know (I certainly didn’t)—for example, about Shanghai's role in Jewish survival, about the curious politics of Brazil that had room for Jewish immigration. And you will appreciate, in a way you might not have before, the critical significance for civilization itself of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1951.’ --Patrick Henry, the former executive director of the Collegeville [Minnesota] Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research