The Yiddish Mime


Chaja Goldstein was a cabaret star in Berlin and Amsterdam during the 1930s. Although she was a non-observant Jew, she performed throughout the world, as the Yiddish Mime. Her art, though culturally Jewish, was meant to portray a sense of The Other, the outsider, a topic that touched the hearts of her fans as intolerance spread throughout Europe. Her life was filled with color, glitter, passion, and romance, but her work meant everything to her. At first, all that mattered was to be a star, but then, after Hitler took over Germany, her mimes became a vehicle to personally communicate with her audience. In 1942, her talent provided the only way for her to stay alive at the Westerbork Cabaret.

This is not a typical Holocaust novel. The very real characters of this novel were members of the hunted intelligentsia, who faced the rise of fascism in pre-World War II Europe, the culmination of the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, and the transport to the beyond that took the lives of 107,000 souls.

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