In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas
(1922-2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian
boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and
Central Asia ...and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet
Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely
seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in
Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of
the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic
orchard, and Rozenbaumas's early apprenticeship as a tailor once
his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged
Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother
and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved
refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his
unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After
the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist
university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately
escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife
give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast
literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during,
and after WWII, Rozenbaumas's account stands out for the
singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events
of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The
Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony
of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original
portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.
Cataclysm Moishe Rozenbaumas
The Odyssey of an Apple Thief,
11/2019
Book Chapter
The Germans attacked from all sides and advanced in every direction. Cities closer to the frontier would be occupied later, while those in the interior were captured by lateral and in-depth ...breakthroughs, having encirclement as their objective. These German tactics meant that, despite its proximity to the border, by the war’s second day Telz was still unoccupied. At the factory where I worked and where I was the only Jew, I was assigned to a civil defense unit. I was provided a wagon hitched to two draft horses, strong like elephants, or, rather, as we would say in Yiddish, like
The Dream of France Moishe Rozenbaumas
The Odyssey of an Apple Thief,
11/2019
Book Chapter
My father had to return to Paris, and we left shortly thereafter, still in a slightly unreal state of exhilaration. Nevertheless, we were no longer afraid of anyone. But in spite of everything, our ...morale wasn’t terribly sunny. We arrived in Paris on April 13, 1957. Our journey had taken three and a half months. We weren’t superstitious, but the thirteenth did not overly delight us. What was really happening to us was a process of questioning, whether we had made the wrong choice by taking the road to freedom. It certainly can’t be said that we were held in
At the time of our enlistment early in 1942, the predicament of the Soviet army was disastrous. We now know that right up until the German attack, Stalin had not wanted to believe there would be war. ...In the years prior, the purges he had conducted into the heart of the high command had destabilized the leadership and deprived the army of its best strategists. No one had foreseen the speed and fearsome efficiency of the German offensive, which forced the Red Army into a total rout right through to 1943. The front sagged along its entire length and did
Return to Life—L’chaim Moishe Rozenbaumas
The Odyssey of an Apple Thief,
11/2019
Book Chapter
When the war was over I returned to my unit, where we proceeded to celebrate our victory. Each of us received a letter signed by Stalin himself, in recognition of our participation in the war of ...1939–45. The only thing I would hold on to from the war, other than my decorations, was the habit of consuming a lot of alcohol, regardless of what it was called, its strength, or its quality. Vodka was by far my favorite, but no one was very particular in those days, and, in an era of shortages, cologne served the purpose very well.
