The Book of Aron: A novel-阿隆之书

作者：Jim Shepard

书名：The Book of Aron: A novel《阿隆之书》

中文简介：1942年的夏天，华沙贫民窟一所孤儿院将近200名饥饿孩童被德国军人赶出，集体被塞入开往特雷布林卡集中营的火车。谢巴德借助想象力，援引了大量历史素材，把华沙孤儿院描绘得活灵活现。这部小说讲述了一个可怜的波兰男孩与孤儿照看人——儿科医生贾努茨·科扎克之间的友谊。

英文简介：The acclaimed National Book Award finalist—“one of the United States’ finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”—now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust.

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo. 

When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape—as his mentor suspected he could—to spread word about the atrocities? 
Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron’s voice will remember it forever.