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That Year of Our War
The momentous year of 1944 is teenaged Sarah's year of starting life anew, as she copes with her mother's death, her father's army duty in Europe, and first love among her Brooklyn relatives. By the author of Leah's Journey. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. Lit Guild Alt.
356 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1994
2 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Gloria Goldreich
37 books60 followersGloria Goldreich graduated from Brandeis University and did graduate work in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a coordinator in the Department of Jewish Education at National Hadassah and served as Public Relations Director of the Baruch College of the City University of New York.
While still an undergraduate at Brandeis, she was a winner of the Seventeen Magazine short story contest where her first nationally published work appeared. Subsequently, her short fiction and critical essays have appeared in Commentary, McCalls, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Ms., Chatelaine, Hadassah Magazine and numerous other magazines and journals. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated.
She is the author of a series of children's books on women in the professions entitled What Can She Be? She has also written novels for young adults, Ten Traditional Jewish Stories, and she edited a prize-winning anthology A Treasury of Jewish Literature.
Her novel, Leah's Journey won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 1979, and her second novel Four Days won the Federation Arts and Letters Award. Her other novels include Promised Land, This Burning Harvest, Leah's Children, West to Eden, Mothers, Years of Dreams and That Year of Our War. Her books have been selections of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and the Troll Book Club.
She has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada.
Gloria Goldreich is married to an attorney and is the mother of two daughters and a son, and the grandmother of six grandchildren.
While still an undergraduate at Brandeis, she was a winner of the Seventeen Magazine short story contest where her first nationally published work appeared. Subsequently, her short fiction and critical essays have appeared in Commentary, McCalls, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Ms., Chatelaine, Hadassah Magazine and numerous other magazines and journals. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated.
She is the author of a series of children's books on women in the professions entitled What Can She Be? She has also written novels for young adults, Ten Traditional Jewish Stories, and she edited a prize-winning anthology A Treasury of Jewish Literature.
Her novel, Leah's Journey won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 1979, and her second novel Four Days won the Federation Arts and Letters Award. Her other novels include Promised Land, This Burning Harvest, Leah's Children, West to Eden, Mothers, Years of Dreams and That Year of Our War. Her books have been selections of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and the Troll Book Club.
She has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada.
Gloria Goldreich is married to an attorney and is the mother of two daughters and a son, and the grandmother of six grandchildren.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 27, 2018
Goldreich has penned a wartime, coming-of-age novel, which I found surprisingly thoroughly engrossing.
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Initially this novel seemed deceptively simple. Yet, as I became more immersed in the narrative, I was encouraged to continue on as the rhythm and the flow of this nostalgic tale evolved. Although I was very young at the time of this final year of WWII, many vivid memories of that period were recalled.
This is the story of teen, Sharon Grossberg and her Jewish family during 1944. In addition to the trauma of her father and several male relatives serving in the armed forces, she endured the deterioration and subsequent death of her mother from leukemia. This period of coming-of-age for her was more stressful because of those events and the fact that she had to rely upon the care of assorted family members without the loving presence of her father.
Goldreich has clearly described a loving, devoted clan, each with his or her individual traits. Religious holidays and rich,varied customs were portrayed. Included in their daily lives they had to endure the tensions from the news of the war at home and the loss of relatives during the Holocaust.
Goldreich is a gifted artist who has explored many universal issues.
***********************************
Initially this novel seemed deceptively simple. Yet, as I became more immersed in the narrative, I was encouraged to continue on as the rhythm and the flow of this nostalgic tale evolved. Although I was very young at the time of this final year of WWII, many vivid memories of that period were recalled.
This is the story of teen, Sharon Grossberg and her Jewish family during 1944. In addition to the trauma of her father and several male relatives serving in the armed forces, she endured the deterioration and subsequent death of her mother from leukemia. This period of coming-of-age for her was more stressful because of those events and the fact that she had to rely upon the care of assorted family members without the loving presence of her father.
Goldreich has clearly described a loving, devoted clan, each with his or her individual traits. Religious holidays and rich,varied customs were portrayed. Included in their daily lives they had to endure the tensions from the news of the war at home and the loss of relatives during the Holocaust.
Goldreich is a gifted artist who has explored many universal issues.
July 24, 2011
In these days of e-books driving the extinction of bookstores, I live for thrift shops, where one can find literary gems for a few dollars. I just paid 50 cents for the 1994 book “That Year of Our War,” by Gloria Goldreich. I loved it.
That Year of Our War is the story of an extended Jewish family dealing with the emotions and events of the last year of World War 2, as their horror at what happened dawned. The settings – the town of Woodstock in upstate New York and the neighborhood I grew up in in Brooklyn – made it easy to vividly picture the scenes.
At the same time that I was experiencing 1943 through the eyes of Ms. Goldreich, who was likely telling her own grandmother’s story, I was also attempting to read Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin,” which chronicles the lives of the US ambassador to Berlin and his feisty, slutty daughter in 1933, as the horror to come slowly dawns on them, too. The book is narrative nonfiction, by a master of the genre.
Yet I put down In The Garden of Beasts midway, so involved was I in the family drama of That Year of Our War, and I never got back to it. Perhaps it is because I write nonfiction all day long that I must read fiction to unwind late at night, but I found myself wrapped up in Goldreich’s tale, full of conversation, in a way that I didn’t with Larsen’s assault of quotations from snippets of real documents arranged into imagined conversations. The novel form allows the reader to suspend disbelief, but for the narrative nonfiction look at the same time period, the flow stopped as I wondered how the author could have understood the characters’ motives and feelings to the extent that he recounted.
I’ve just written my first narrative nonfiction book, “The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), and I hope that my story takes the best of the styles of GoldReich and Larsen.
That Year of Our War is the story of an extended Jewish family dealing with the emotions and events of the last year of World War 2, as their horror at what happened dawned. The settings – the town of Woodstock in upstate New York and the neighborhood I grew up in in Brooklyn – made it easy to vividly picture the scenes.
At the same time that I was experiencing 1943 through the eyes of Ms. Goldreich, who was likely telling her own grandmother’s story, I was also attempting to read Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin,” which chronicles the lives of the US ambassador to Berlin and his feisty, slutty daughter in 1933, as the horror to come slowly dawns on them, too. The book is narrative nonfiction, by a master of the genre.
Yet I put down In The Garden of Beasts midway, so involved was I in the family drama of That Year of Our War, and I never got back to it. Perhaps it is because I write nonfiction all day long that I must read fiction to unwind late at night, but I found myself wrapped up in Goldreich’s tale, full of conversation, in a way that I didn’t with Larsen’s assault of quotations from snippets of real documents arranged into imagined conversations. The novel form allows the reader to suspend disbelief, but for the narrative nonfiction look at the same time period, the flow stopped as I wondered how the author could have understood the characters’ motives and feelings to the extent that he recounted.
I’ve just written my first narrative nonfiction book, “The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), and I hope that my story takes the best of the styles of GoldReich and Larsen.
July 23, 2017
A Jewish novel, set in the United States on D-Day, when "our" boys landed at Normandy.
Sharon Grossberg is a very Jewish high school girl in the U.S., surrounded by family and friends, who grows up to be a doctor. But this is the story of how she and her family live through the shocks of WW II. They collect things, they save things, they work toward getting their relatives' freedom, they observe their traditions, they weep, they grieve, and they live.
There is Nachum Adler, who was sent to Terezin, who wrote to the Red Cross; the letter was delivered to Emanuel Weiner, a judge was contacted, a senator and the chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern art where two of Nachum's portraits were in the collection. Months later he arrived "gaunt and grief-haunted, possessed of the gentle, contemplative patience of those who have abandoned all hope and thus all urgency, [like] terminally ill patients who cease to ask me about experimental treatments and alternative drugs. Their voices, too are very soft and they move, as Nachum did that first year, with slow grace and solemn gesture. There is no longer anything of enough importance to impel their haster or intensity. Like Nathum . . . they are neither hopeful nor desperate. Life is eimply something that happens to them as they wait for death."
". . . Marvin moved awkwardly, with the shifting gait that I now know to be peculiar to patients who have been so long bedridden that they walk unsteadily as they convalese, resembling passengers on land after a long sea vonage."
A psychiatrist says "the only difference between the sane and the patients he sees is that his people have no brakes. They don't know when to stop. No inhibitions. He says their honesty is sometimes refreshing."
Besides these insights, it is a book of Jewish traditions, taken calmly with little histrionics. A good read of the Jewish way of life, at an absolutely horrible time in history..
Sharon Grossberg is a very Jewish high school girl in the U.S., surrounded by family and friends, who grows up to be a doctor. But this is the story of how she and her family live through the shocks of WW II. They collect things, they save things, they work toward getting their relatives' freedom, they observe their traditions, they weep, they grieve, and they live.
There is Nachum Adler, who was sent to Terezin, who wrote to the Red Cross; the letter was delivered to Emanuel Weiner, a judge was contacted, a senator and the chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern art where two of Nachum's portraits were in the collection. Months later he arrived "gaunt and grief-haunted, possessed of the gentle, contemplative patience of those who have abandoned all hope and thus all urgency, [like] terminally ill patients who cease to ask me about experimental treatments and alternative drugs. Their voices, too are very soft and they move, as Nachum did that first year, with slow grace and solemn gesture. There is no longer anything of enough importance to impel their haster or intensity. Like Nathum . . . they are neither hopeful nor desperate. Life is eimply something that happens to them as they wait for death."
". . . Marvin moved awkwardly, with the shifting gait that I now know to be peculiar to patients who have been so long bedridden that they walk unsteadily as they convalese, resembling passengers on land after a long sea vonage."
A psychiatrist says "the only difference between the sane and the patients he sees is that his people have no brakes. They don't know when to stop. No inhibitions. He says their honesty is sometimes refreshing."
Besides these insights, it is a book of Jewish traditions, taken calmly with little histrionics. A good read of the Jewish way of life, at an absolutely horrible time in history..
March 10, 2021
a wonderful interconnected U.S. Jewish family striving to make a difference in WW2
November 21, 2022
Excellent WW 2 era coming of age story of a young Jewish girl.
April 1, 2011
This is a coming of age story narrated by Sharon Grossberg, a fifteen year old whose mother dies on D Day 1944. Her father, a medical doctor, is serving in the Army in Europe, and her aunt and uncle take in Sharon "for the duration." She becomes part of an extended orthodox Jewish family living in Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY. "It is a year during which birth and death converge, hope triumphs over despair, and the national tragedy of world war and the yearning for peace dominate thought and dream." I enjoyed reading about WWII on the home front -- the gathering of scrap metal for the war effort, the songs they sang, the ration books, etc. etc. because although I was younger during the war than Sharon is in the story, the recognition was there as I read and remembered some of the things she wrote about.
December 29, 2008
I absolutely loved this book! I am a fan of Gloria Goldreich, especially of her Jewish themed books...Leah's Journey, Leah's Children. Her more recent books such as Dinner with Anna Karenina, Open Doors, and Walking Home are great also. But this book was so poignant that I felt myself crying in spots. Some might say it is sentimental but I enjoyed this view of life in America during World War II, told through the eyes of a teenaged Jewish girl. Great book.
November 14, 2012
Wonderful characters. Loved this story.
October 11, 2011
This was a wonderfully written book, full of the emotion of the times. I loved it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews