Evad­ing the Nazis, writ­ten by a retired rab­bi who was a hid­den child, is more than a sto­ry of a Jew­ish child hid­den by right­eous French farm­ers; it is the sto­ry of a dynam­ic, brave woman whose charis­ma, mox­ie, and busi­ness sense enabled her to trav­el on pub­lic con­veyances through­out Nazi occu­pied France, to ask a Nazi sol­dier for help in car­ry­ing her suit­case, and oth­er audac­i­ties. She always had a joke to make a police­man laugh. Their fam­i­ly of three — the father had aban­doned them before the sec­ond child was born — spent the war years with false papers in Paris, until Abrami’s moth­er real­ized that with more SS on the streets, her boys were more and more at risk. By this time she had built up a ​“prac­tice” in the French coun­try­side, sup­ply­ing farm­ers with goods, while they sup­plied her with food for her fam­i­ly. Hav­ing some med­ical knowl­edge, she began to act as an unof­fi­cial nurse for some of the farm­ers’ ail­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers. They were loy­al to her, and were the best of guardians for her two boys, whom they treat­ed like fam­i­ly. And if you can imag­ine, dur­ing the whole time, their dar­ing moth­er lived in Paris among the Nazis and the cor­rupt French police. In her expe­ri­ence, most of the French gen­tiles were empa­thet­ic to the plight of their Jew­ish neigh­bors, but not the police , who were avid tor­men­tors and col­lec­tors of inno­cent Jews. The lat­ter part of the book is about the son’s expe­ri­ence in learn­ing about Judaism, becom­ing a Hebrew teacher and a rab­bi, and his chang­ing views about the denom­i­na­tion of Judaism in which he felt most com­fort­able.

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