Undeliverable

'The last time I saw you was nearly fifty years ago. Father and you were in hiding at Uncle Piet and Aunt Nel's place on Schieweg. I was somewhere in the Crooswijk district with people who were very apprehensive about having the small Jewish boy that they had taken into their house [...] For a long time I have put off writing this letter. But someone has to report to you what happened to our family and to your and Father's siblings. I am the only one who can still do that, and I'm no longer that young either.''

Half a century after the murder of his mother in Auschwitz, Isaac Lipschits writes her a letter. In it, he reawakens memories of their family life in the years before the outbreak of World War II, as well as its repercussions. He relates to her the fate of her husband, her daughter, and her five sons. First published in Dutch as Onbestelbaar: Herinneringen in briefvorm, Isaac Lipschits' letter (in book form) received wide acclaim in the Netherlands. Now available in an English translation, Undeliverable: A Letter of Reminiscence brings a unique, powerful, and personal Holocaust memoir to English readers for the first time. Isaac Lipschits (1930-2008) was hidden during World War II in Rotterdam, and later in the northern Netherlands Province of Friesland. From 1948 to 1949, he served as a volunteer in the Israeli army. He studied in Amsterdam and Paris, and lectured at the universities of Amsterdam, Haifa, Jerusalem, Rotterdam, and Leiden. Appointed Professor of Contemporary History at Groningen University in 1971, he took early retirement at the end of 1990, and wrote this small but momentous book in 1992. Isaac Lipschits died on May 24, 2008. His lasting memorial is the interactive digital monument of the 102,000 Dutch Jews murdered in the concentration camps.

"A moving tribute of a son to the mother he never really knew, too young when they were separated to have ever understood her, struggling to find her through the cobwebs of half a century's worth of memories and forgetting." -- Jessica V. Roitman, H-Net Reviews, H-Low-Countries, August 2016