Alexander Askanas

Love and Obsession at the Time of Exile Alexander Askanas

This is a historical fiction novel about the 1968 Jewish exile from Poland. In 1968, the Polish Communist government started an anti-Semitic action under the pretext that the Polish Jews were taking the Israeli side in 1967 Sixth-Day War. The Communists "encouraged" the Jews to leave the country. The encouragement came in the form of firing Jews from their job, expelling them from their universities, or generally humiliating them. Approximately two-thirds of the Polish Jews left for Israel, the USA, or Scandinavia. In 1968, there were only tiny remnants of the once largest European Jewish community. Out of approximately thirty thousand Jews, the twenty thousand left and their citizenship was renounced. Those were the survivors of the Holocaust or their children. This put a stain of shame, which is hard to erase, on the Polish Communist government. The story of this exile of 1968 is told by a doctor who left for the USA and is engrossed in an obsessive love for a young Polish-Jewish woman living in France.