The Book of Aron
1st Edition
Published on 7. May 2015
256 pages
978-1-78429-031-3 (ISBN)
Description
Warsaw, Poland, 1939.
My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done or What Were You Thinking.
Aron is a nine-year-old Polish Jew, and a troublemaker. As the walls go up around the ghetto in Warsaw, as the lice and typhus rage, food is stolen and even Jewish police betray their people, Aron smuggles from the other side to survive.
In a place where no one thinks of anyone but himself, the only exception is Doctor Korczak; children's rights activist and embattled orphanage director.
They call the Doctor a hero. Aron is not a hero. He is not special or selfless or spirited. He is ordinary.
He is willing to do what the Doctor will not.
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Jim Shepard is the author of four previous collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which won The Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his short fiction has often been selected for Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. The most recent of his seven novels, The Book of Aron, won the PEN/New England Award, the Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Harold U. Ribalow Book Prize for Jewish literature, and the Clark Fiction Prize. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Karen Shepard, his three children and three beagles, and he teaches at Williams College.
