Konin: A Quest - Softcover

The extraordinary story of a small Jewish ghetto in a small town in Poland - and of one man's obsessive quest to discover its fate and its survivors. Since his early childhood in London, Theo Richmond had heard his relatives mention a place called Konin, the Polish Shetetl from which both his parents came. He felt an irresistible urge to find out more about this small town and its Jewish community, to place on record something of what the Nazis had destroyed and thus to remember. He searched for its few survivors, scattered in many lands. Starting with an old man in London, he traced others, not only in Britain, but in Brooklyn, Florida, Texas, on a kibbutz in Israel, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

In 1939 a community of three thousand vanished into history. Twenty-five years later one man set out to find them. Konin is the story of his obsessive search for a vanished world.

'It is a great book, beautifully written, compelling from beginning to end, and animated by a quiet passion that forgetting should not be allowed its victory ... Theo Richmond has rescued a small shtetl town from oblivion: everything is restored with pungent life, the slithering fish in the market, the pickles in the barrels, sounds of Passover, the thwack of the teacher's stick. A place and a people destroyed by horror have found a great remembrancer' Michael Ignatieff

'In its combination of personal and historical drama, it is unique, engrossing and triumphant' Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List

'Unforgettable ...With the combined and highly developed skills of historian, biographer, interviewer, anthropologists and lover of the object of his quest, his sensitively revealed every possible layer of the life and the knowable times of Konin ... Richmond's mesmerising account has made us feel like inhabitants'Hugo Gryn, Sunday Times