When the political winds changed, a little boy knew what to do.
“A Promise of Sweet Tea is at once a haunting glimpse of one small corner of the Holocaust, in all of its agony, perfidy, and caprice, and a heartening celebration of family and home that lovingly commemorates a lost world. Pinchas Eliyahu Blitt’s memoir is also, sadly, more relevant than ever in terms of where the world in 2021 has found itself.”
The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoir Program
presents
A promise of Sweet Tea
By
Pinchas Eliyahu Blitt
Into a transformed Western political landscape set ablaze by racism, street violence, and antisemitism, comes the story of a ten-year-old Jewish boy who detected a similar change in the political winds and ran with his family into the Ukrainian woods.
A PROMISE OF SWEET TEA by Pinchas Eliyahu Blitt (July 15, 2021, $14.95 US, $14.80 CAN; ISBN 1989719155; trade paperback) is what literary historian David Roskies calls “a Yiddish memoir written in English”, and a heart-pumping chronicle of one family’s courageous journey into the unknown. It's also a useful manual for anyone laying awake at night thinking about a new army of cossacks in keffiyehs, rebottling old pretext to hunt Jews on American streets - not knowing what to do, or even the reason this has come upon them.
“Pinchas Blitt is a master storyteller. The poignant saga of his and his family’s escape into the Ukrainian woods reminds us of the dangers of social ideologies on the march as it brings a precious, lost world to life.”
If for today’s generation of highly educated American Jews, Blitt isn’t a more easily relatable member of the lettered, pre-war, Viennese Jewish intelligentsia like Stefan Zweig, the 10-year-old boy and his family are in a class by themselves when it comes to the things today’s Jews privately yearn for when they binge watch Shtisel - basic decency, simple faith, and survival.
A PROMISE OF SWEET TEA is the 120th book in the Azrieli Foundation's Holocaust Survivor Memoir program and the crowning achievement of a project that exists to tell the stories that would otherwise go untold, undertaken with little fanfare but monumental results by Naomi Azrieli, her late father, David Azrieli, and their venerated Canadian foundation.
“A Promise of Sweet Tea, simultaneously heart wrenching and life-affirming, is about much more than one person’s story of survival. Pinchas Blitt’s memoir is in equal parts a revival of a world that has been lost, a story that sheds light on lesser understood horrors of the Shoah, and a profound philosophical meditation with relevance for today. Blitt, an actor in Yiddish theater, is a master storyteller, and I could not put this book down until it’s powerful, poignant end. ”
Pinchas Blitt is also not a renown Stanford University historian like Steven J. Zipperstein (Pogrom), nor did he emerge from the educated Italian middle class like chemist, Primo Levi. Whatever his formidable accomplishments later in life, the ten-year old boy that narrates A PROMISE OF SWEET TEA is a product of the smallest of small, rural, Ukrainian shtetls. Like the small towns that dot the American heartland, Pinchas Eliyahu’s Kortelisywas was also “multicultural”, but in the very worst sense of the word. Medieval refugees from Ashkenaz, the Volhyn Jews of his saga had endured for close to a millennia as a small, disreputable minority, amidst masses of upper class Poles and Ukrainian peasants. Relations with their church-going neighbors were long-standing and intimate enough to be called “safe”, until the political winds changed. The hovels where the Volhyn Jews made do without indoor plumbing, paved floors, electricity or modern medicine as late as the 1930’s, comprise the chrysalis of most of American Jewry.