About Displaced Persons
• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (August 23, 2011)
In May 1945, Pavel Mandl, a Polish Jew recently liberated from a concentration camp, finds himself among similarly displaced persons gathered in the Allied occupation zones of a defeated Germany. Possessing little besides a map, a few tins of food, and a talent for black-market trading, he must scrape together a new life in a chaotic community of refugees, civilians, and soldiers. With fellow refugees Fela, a young widow, and Chaim, a resourceful teenager with impressive smuggling skills, Pavel establishes a makeshift family, as together they face an uncertain future. Eventually the trio immigrates to the United States, where they grapple with past traumas that arise again in the everyday moments of lives no longer dominated by the need to endure, fight, hide, or escape.
Ghita Schwarz’s Displaced Persons is an astonishing novel of grief, anger, and survival that examines the landscape of liberation and reveals the interior despairs and joys of immigrants shaped by war and trauma.
About Ghita Schwarz
Ghita Schwarz is a civil rights lawyer specializing in immigrants’ rights. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Displaced Persons was a finalist for the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Fiction.
Visit Gita at her website, gitaschwarz.com.
Ghita’s Tour Stops
Tuesday, August 23rd: Reviews from the Heart
Thursday, August 25th: Raging Bibliomania
Friday, August 26th: Books Like Breathing
Tuesday, August 30th: The House of the Seven Tails
Wednesday, August 31st: Rundpinne
Thursday, September 1st: Man of La Book
Friday, September 2nd: Diary of an Eccentric
Monday, September 5th: Life in the Thumb
Thursday, September 8th: Life in Review
Friday, September 9th: Diary of a Stay at Home Mom
Monday, September 12th: nomadreader
Mary Anne Lee says
We will be hosting Ghita Schwarz in person with more than a dozen other authors at the sixth annual Festival of Books at Spencertown Academy Arts Center in Spencertown NY September 3-5. Would love to see folks from the TLC Book Tour community there. All programs are free and open to the public.
Details at http://www.spencertownacdemy.org/books.html