Hello and happy Sunday. I’m still trying to organize my post scheduling since I was gone for about twenty days but kept reading. I have some ideas that have accumulated from before but also during my Eurotrip, so I have to sit down and figure out what to post when. That being said, today I’m bringing you a ‘must,’ a quiet yet very important book that can (and I think should) be read both by younger and older readers. I’m talking about 37 Days at Sea: Aboard the M.S. St. Louis, 1939 by Barbara Krasner.

If you don’t know what the title is referencing, that’s okay, I didn’t either. The M.S. St. Louis was a ship that left in 1939 from Germany to Cuba, where its passengers, German Jews escaping the Holocaust had been promise refuge. However, when they arrived to Cuba, it was revealed that they’d been lied to and issued fake documents. The story is narrated by Ruthie, a young passenger of the M.S. St. Louis, based on one of the real victims of the Holocaust and this particular event.

I think that now more than ever these stories should be known by everyone. It shouldn’t just be up to us, Jews, to keep history and memory alive.