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Title: Remember This Dream

Author: Harold Gershowitz

Narrator: Michael Rahhal

Format: Unabridged

Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-04-16

Publisher: Harold Gershowitz

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Meticulously researched history is woven into an extraordinary family saga. 1911, a time of continuing upheaval for Polish Jews, an era of exodus, when the poor and proud seek new lands of promise across vast seas; bold dreams are followed toward a brighter future. The turbulence of the times separate sisters Anna and Dvoyra. On a ship teeming with fellow immigrants bound for America, Anna journeys with her children to join her husband in Baltimore only to have her highest hopes dashed and her deepest passions aroused. Dvoyra, who longs to join Anna in America, is forced to remain in Poland with her family. For nearly half a century and half a world apart, clinging to the dream that someday they will be reunited, both families summon astonishing courage in the face of great adversity, Anna in the grip of relentless poverty, and Dvoyra amid the horrors of anti-Semitism, war, and captivity. Ultimately their most heartfelt dreams are fulfilled in the lives of their children.

Members Reviews:

A microcosm of American immigrant and rural Polish shtetl life

I was originally interested in reading "Remember This Dream" because my grandmother and great-grandparents immigrated from a small village near Lublin, Poland in 1913 around the same time as one of the novel's protagonists. Sadly, other than a few stories and a copy of their Russian-Polish passports and ship manifests, I have precious little information on my great-grandparents' immigrant experience, and was interested to see how the novel would handle such details as the ocean crossing (squalid doesn't even begin to describe the horrors faced by steerage class passengers).

Harold Gershowitz's "Remember This Dream" chronicles the lives of two sisters, Dvoyra and Anna, who have grown up in a Polish shtetl. Anna has been living with her in-laws and her three small children waiting for the opportunity to immigrate to America, where she will reunite with her husband. Dvoyra ends up staying in Poland, where she sees the horrors of WWI and WWII unfold firsthand. (For an excellent background on Polish shtetl life between the wars, be sure to watchImage Before My Eyes - A History of Jewish Life in Poland Before).

The main thrust of the novel is Anna's hardscrabble new life in America; her reunion with her husband yields an angry, bitter stranger obsessed with making ends meet to the point that he yanks his young daughters out of school and puts them to work in garment sweatshops. Union organizing takes up a hefty portion of the plot, with Anna and her daughters struggling to organize labor unions.

Meanwhile, in Poland Dvoyra's daughter Penina becomes involved in the blossoming Zionist movement even as Anna's daughter Rachel marries the head of the CGWA union. Following a half-century of American and European history, "Remember This Dream" serves as a microcosm of the political turmoil and pogroms of Eastern Europe and growing anti-Semitism that eventually culminated in the infamous concentration camps such as Auschwitz. From an American perspective, we see the gradual shedding of immigrant culture (particularly rebellion against shtetl culture) and Old World traditions. For an excellent celluloid take on this phenomenon,Hester Streetfeatures a Jewish shtetl immigrant desperate to shed his Old World image in order to prosper in the New, and is mortally embarrassed by his Old World wife when she arrives.