Julie Masis has woven her grand­par­ents’ Holo­caust mem­o­ries, her par­ents’ lives in the post-war Sovi­et Union, and her own research and reflec­tions into a short, engag­ing memoir.

The title of Masis’s book, How My Grand­fa­ther Stole a Shoe, points to its most impor­tant char­ac­ter, her grand­fa­ther, Shlo­mo. When we first meet Shlo­mo, he is cel­e­brat­ing his hun­dredth birth­day in a Mass­a­chu­setts senior liv­ing home, a seem­ing mir­a­cle giv­en the hor­rif­ic ordeal he and his fel­low Moldovan Jews under­went dur­ing the war. 

The author evokes her grand­fa­ther by retelling the war-time sto­ries he told her, adding anec­dotes from her vis­its to him in his home. Shlo­mo lacks the elo­quence of a Pri­mo Levi or Elie Weisel, and he does not seek expla­na­tions for the Holo­caust. On the oth­er hand, Shlo­mo shot and killed two Ger­man sol­diers in com­bat, a fact that Masis learned not from him, but from her research in Sovi­et mil­i­tary archives. This also dis­tin­guish­es him from those more cel­e­brat­ed sur­vivors who are renowned main­ly for their writing.

Thanks in part to Masis’s clear and sim­ple prose, Shlo­mo emerges as a strik­ing­ly nor­mal man despite the hor­rors he endured. We learn that he wor­ries that Masis is still sin­gle in her ear­ly thir­ties. He assures her that he can help her find a hus­band. (One can hear in that offer the con­fi­dence of a man who repeat­ed­ly found solu­tions to life-threat­en­ing crises.) Lat­er, he tells Masis that he loves her ​“because you come to vis­it me,” offer­ing her a pair of sun­glass­es as a reward for her fidelity. 

Masis is a jour­nal­ist, and she reports the atroc­i­ties and cru­el­ty of the Nazis and their allies with­out adding com­men­tary or express­ing out­rage. She rec­og­nizes that the details deliv­er an impact with­out embell­ish­ment. The author writes that she reject­ed the idea of cre­at­ing a nov­el out of these events, but she has a novelist’s eye for telling details. For exam­ple, she relates that her grand­moth­er fell in love with Shlo­mo when he offered her a steady­ing hand, and, on accept­ing it, she exclaimed, ​“You have such warm hands.”

Regard­ing the atroc­i­ties, two of them stand out for their deprav­i­ty. In one, Roman­ian sol­diers threw their Jew­ish com­rades out of speed­ing trains. In the oth­er, a Nazi offi­cer liked to dri­ve his motor­cy­cle with a Jew­ish boy roped to the rear, stop­ping when the vic­tim had been dragged to death. 

Giv­en the volu­mi­nous col­lec­tion of Holo­caust mem­oirs, it is fair to ask of any new offer­ing, what makes this book fresh enough to read? How My Grand­fa­ther Stole A Shoe offers three dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures that make it a worth­while read. First, in recount­ing the fate of the Jews of Moldo­va, it cov­ers one of the less well-known Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties. And, the book includes haunt­ing pen­cil illus­tra­tions by the late Felix Lem­ber­sky, which add to the narrative’s emo­tion­al punch. Final­ly, Masis weaves in sto­ries of her par­ents and her­self, down to the present, which con­vey the sense of a chain of Jew­ish life con­nect­ing past and present that is so strong not even the Holo­caust can break it. 

Adding to that sense is the fact that Masis jour­neyed back to the places where great evils were inflict­ed on her grand­par­ents. She finds that the Jews are large­ly gone, but anti­semitism lingers nev­er­the­less. Sad­ly, that is the oth­er unbreak­able chain link­ing past and present.