Acknowledgments
In the Narrow Places was not written from a narrow place. It was written with the excellent support and thoughtfulness of Gil Student and those at OU PRESS, and Mathew Miller and his team at Koren Publishers Jerusalem. I write this with the immense support of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, the Wexner Foundation, the Mandel Foundation, the Covenant Foundation and Avi Chai Foundation. It was written from a place of enormous blessings; my family, my friends, my community and my colleagues have all made my life and my work exceptionally expansive. I thank God for all of these blessings. Perhaps, as a result of this expansiveness, I have not been able to capture fully the experience of loss that inspired the writing of this book. For that I take full responsibility.
This book honors the memory of dozens of family members I never met who lost their lives in a small Polish town, Zakrzewek, on October 18, 1942, when the SS gathered the 600 remaining Jews in the town and murdered them simply for being Jewish. It is, in my family narrative, what one sociologist has called “a legacy in the form of absences.” It is the closest touch-point that I have for the Ĥurban, the destruction of the Temples, Jerusalem and all those who lost their lives then. May the memory of these tragic victims be for a blessing and a signpost that persecution will lead to redemption because we will make it so.
Erica Brown
Silver Spring, MD
Adar ii 5771 / March 2011