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The Avengers
Written by Rich Cohen
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The Avengers

A Jewish War Story

Written by Rich Cohen

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Published by: Vintage

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On Sale: October 09, 2001
Pages: 272 | ISBN: 978-0-375-70529-8
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Synopsis|Excerpt

Synopsis

Rich Cohen, author of the acclaimed Tough Jews, again narrates a little-known episode of Jewish history, this time altering what we thought we knew about the Holocaust.

Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner, Ruzka Korczak-comrades, lovers, friends. In the Lithuanian ghetto of Vilna, they were the heart of a breathtakingly courageous underground movement, and when the ghetto was liquidated, they fled to the forests and joined other partisans in continued sabotage and resistance. Riveting, poignant and uplifting, The Avengers is a powerful exploration of resistance and revenge, of courage and dedication, and an inside look at some of the intrepid individuals who fought against the Holocaust and the nazi occupation of Europe.

Excerpt

Introduction
It is like no Holocaust story I have ever heard. There are no cattle cars in it, and no concentration camps. It takes place in underground hideouts and forest clearings, and in the ruins of German cities after the Second World War.

I first heard the story in 1977, when my family visited Israel, a trip partly chronicled in the photo album my mother put together when we returned to our house in suburban Chicago. The pictures show a smiling family backed by the usual landmarks: Western Wall, Dead Sea, Masada. I was ten years old. My brother was fifteen. In many photographs, he wears black, sun-absorbing concert T-shirts. In one, he makes a muscle. My sister, who would soon turn eighteen, looks bored, like every minute on this trip is another party missed. There is a shot of my father leaning on an Israeli tank, looking into the distance, as if scanning for Babylonians. My mother was taking the pictures, or else holding her hands over her face so no pictures of her could be taken. When it comes to photos, my mom is a classic case of dish-it-out-but-can't-take-it. Viewed together, these pictures record a middle-class Jewish pilgrimage, a family rite, Christmas in the Holy Land: kids squinting through the glare, searching out a lost connection, a link to a homeland that, after all that air travel, feels like just another country.

If you want to know about the rest of our vacation, those moments when the camera stayed in the bag, feuds, quarrels, threats and fits, you must dig deeper, beneath the old diplomas and hockey-mom patches, to the frayed pages of The Cohen Daily News, a newspaper edited and published (by me) during the three weeks we spent in Israel. The paper, which was not really a daily, was handwritten on yellow sheets torn from my father's legal pads. Held together by a clip, the paper was passed from family member to family member. The stories, printed under smudged headlines, set down even the most scandalous rumors. Below my brother's byline ran a piece about my parents: "Herb and Ellen Fool Around." The article talked of a gleam in my dad's eye, of noises on the other side of a wall, of disheveled hair, of laughter. "Ellen was seen under the covers wearing a big smile," the story read. "Talk has it, that was all she was wearing."

Reviews ran in the back of the paper, including my dad's musings on a restaurant in Haifa where every dish was stuffed. "Not only is the food filling," he wrote. "It is stuffing." The last issue of The Cohen Daily News, published as my parents packed, tells of a trip we made to a kibbutz north of Tel Aviv, a visit with relatives once thought lost in the Holocaust. In just a few paragraphs of my sister's blocky print, the story recalls the most important evening of our vacation, our first meeting with the Avengers, veteran fighters who slogged out World War II in the gloomy forests of Eastern Europe, later fought for Bible-bleached Middle Eastern wastes, and were the kind of people who inspired Joseph Goebbels to write in his diary: "One sees what the Jews can do when they are armed." In a dozen sentences, my sister set down the moment that fused the lost connection and made the homeland feel like home -- an electric moment that lurks just beyond the photos in my mother's album.

We drove to the kibbutz by rental car. The directions given to us by the man at the hotel were useless. Israelis -- who knows why -- give directions that are both clipped and broad, like every place is the same place, like any street gets you there: only a fool can miss it. "OK, you come out on the road and you are going," the man said, waving a hand. "You are going and going and going all the time. You are seeing a bridge but you are not going there because you are still going all the time. Then you see a tree, a building, and there you are."
We took a map. I had it on my knees. On family trips, I was the navigator. I was fascinated by maps. This one showed a sliver of land along the sea. Brown, blue. The names of the towns were familiar from religious school: Yafo, Jericho, Beersheba. Looking at the map, I began to sense just how abbreviated Israel is. It seemed the map was actual size. Picking out a town, I would say, "We should be in Netanya in two hours." And just as I was saying this, my father would gear down and say, "Here is Netanya."

We turned onto a road that ran through open fields. Little cars would dart up behind us flashing their lights. You could see them in the rearview mirror. Rolling down his window, my father waved them on. And off they would drive, bounding ahead, trailed by dust. We were going to see Ruzka Korczak; we had been sent by my grandmother. In 1920, my grandmother emigrated to New York from a small town in Poland, where she had nine siblings and an infant niece, the daughter of her oldest brother. Though my grandmother was to be just the first of the children to make the trip, the family ran out of money. And the seasons changed. And the politicians fell. And the War started. Several years after Nazi Germany collapsed, my grandmother got a letter from a woman named Sara, who came from her town in Poland. Sara now lived in Israel, where she searched for survivors, trying to put them back together with lost family. She met ships, studied dockets, interviewed passengers. Early in our vacation, we had lunch with Sara. Even if she had something of interest to say, I missed it. Her husband was named Shlomo; I could not move much beyond that.

In her letter, Sara told my grandmother that almost every Jew in their town had been killed. And yet a member of my grandmother's family had survived -- the niece. For much of the War, this niece had fought as a partisan in the forest. She was now settled on a kibbutz north of Tel Aviv. "Do you remember your niece?" wrote Sara.

"You are her only family. Her name is Ruzka."

The road climbed up a hill. Looking back, I could see the flat brown country below. It was blurry in the dust. We turned onto a bumpy trail. Fields rolled into the distance. The crops were so green they hurt my eyes. The air smelled like Illinois when the farmers sell their vegetables in town. We went around a bend, and there was Ruzka. I had heard stories about her, things she had done in the War. I had expectations. What I got instead was a slight, smiling, gray-haired Jewish woman not so different from my Grandma Esther, who was just then passing her golden years in a retirement complex in North Miami Beach.

When we stepped from the car, Ruzka gave each of us a hug, as if we had met many times before. She had the rugged face of a farm worker -- a dramatic backdrop for her eyes, which were warm and youthful. She asked us many questions and seemed to savor each answer, listening as fully as most people talk. As we followed her along the road, she pointed out buildings: "That is the dining hall," she said. "That is where the children live. That is where we keep the guns." In the distance, we could see children, cattle, goats. The kibbutz is a collective, a socialist settlement where you might work in the fields or pick fruit or milk cows. Spotting any cow, a local can say, "That is my cow." The few kibbutzim that still survive are hold-overs, relics from the pioneer days, when such one-for-all communities seemed the best way of coping with scorching summers and marauding neighbors. Looking to the eastern horizon, where the fields turned brown, Ruzka said, "Before we fought the Six Day War in '67, the other side of those fields was Jordan."

Ruzka led us to a white house with a red roof. The windows blazed with light. Inside, the walls were lined with paintings and books. Avi, whom Ruzka married after the War, a handsome, fair-skinned man with white hair and brilliant blue eyes, smiled and said hello. Since emigrating to Palestine in the thirties, Avi had spent much of his life trying to recapture the culture of his youth, the music and literature and food of Austria. "Avi, what are you doing?" asked Ruzka.

He was picking at the tray Ruzka had set out: fruit and vegetables.

"Darling, Ruzka, tell me, why no sausage?"

Ruzka smiled at Avi, and then fixed a plate for each of us.

There was a knock on the door. Then another. The floorboards creaked. The house filled with the smiles and guffaws of old Jews. "This is Abba Kovner," said Ruzka. I had been told Kovner was a poet, that he had won the biggest awards a writer in Israel can win, that soldiers carried his books to war. He looked like no one I had ever seen, a lost Old World prophet. His shoulders were hunched. His body was steely slender, a piece of modern sculpture, edges and angles. His eyes shone with a dark, secretive melancholy. In any picture, his face recedes, more still and somber than the surrounding hills. At his side, never beyond whispering distance, was his wife, Vitka. She was long-limbed, with dark hair and big eyes. Her face was plain until she smiled and her smile remade her face and then her smile was gone and her face fell again into the blank gaze she must have worn as a girl in Eastern Europe.

Abba, Ruzka, Vitka -- this was not an ordinary relationship, not the conventional idea of a married couple crossing the fence to visit a neighbor. These people had met over thirty years before, in the cramped streets of Vilna, the capital of Lithuania -- kids caught in the second act of World War II. Some people have tried to cast their relationship in terms of a traditional love triangle. They say Ruzka and Vitka were in love with Abba, or Abba and Ruzka were in love with Vitka, or Vitka and Abba were in love with Ruzka. In truth, all were in love with all. They finished one another's sentences, read one another's thoughts. The things they endured and survived bound them in ways hard for anyone living today to imagine.

For the most part, they did not like to talk about the past, or about their own exploits. They wanted to know about America, or Chicago, or, in my case, the rigors of fifth grade. Only slowly, often from the mouths of other people, did we learn of the underground army they formed in Europe, of the battles they fought with the Germans, of how they escaped Vilna moments before the Jewish ghetto was destroyed. There were also stories of the forest, where they lived and fought for a year, blowing up enemy trains and transports. The forest is where they spent their last days in Europe. It is where the old life came to an end. And it's where the new life began -- where Israel was born. The story of Abba, Ruzka and Vitka is, after all, a Middle Eastern story. In the woods they were already fighting as Israelis. The courage and grit they found in the trees was the most important thing they would bring to Palestine. The forest is also where they devised the outlandish plots they would carry out in the chaotic days after the War -- plots whereby they visited a measure of vengeance on the men who had killed their families. As they spoke, the sky outside filled with stars. Constellations wheeled. Yellow light glowed in the windows and the room seemed to fall into the past, to the cities and swamps of their youth.

As I grew up, I spoke with Ruzka and Abba and Vitka numerous times, on trips we took every few years to Israel and on their visits to the United States. In my memory, their story plays out before a shifting backdrop -- houses by the sea, suburban lawns, crowded restaurants. I once met Abba in Tel Aviv at the Diaspora Museum, which he had conceived and designed. The museum was built to tell the story not just of the slaughter of the Holocaust, but of the years of Jewish life that had come before the slaughter. His hair was long and gray and he wore chinos and kept his hands in his pockets. He led me through halls of documents and photographs. In one room, he stood before a detailed model of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, a graceful network of arches and supports. "How can you know what we lost," said Abba, "if you don't know what we had."

I usually met Abba, Ruzka and Vitka in their homes on the kibbutz, in rooms crowded with books and music and paintings. Abba and Vitka's son, Michael, is a painter, and often I sat looking at his airy watercolors of houses in the Negev desert. As Abba or Ruzka spoke, doors opened and members of the old crowd wandered in, smiling and laughing, filling in the story. To an American, these people seemed an exotic hybrid -- rugged intellectuals, fighters schooled only by their experience and curiosity. When Ruzka listened, she let her hands fall to her sides, opened her eyes and drank in every word. I often spoke with her as we walked the narrow lanes of the kibbutz, past houses glowing with life, insects underfoot. She held her hands behind her back and talked in a soft voice.

Our visits to the kibbutz were mostly passed happily with our family, with Ruzka and her children -- who are my cousins -- Yehuda and Yonat and Ghadi, their spouses, and their children. Still, whenever I found a chance, I steered the conversation back to Europe, their lives before the war, how they survived, what they did when peace came. I suppose I was obsessed. To me, their story seemed to offer a view of history different from what I saw on television or read in books -- this was World War II as seen from the East, by those on the bottom, by Jews who, with nothing else to lose, decided to fight.

In 1998, I traveled to Israel to meet with Vitka and the other partisans -- those who were still alive, anyway -- who had fought with her during the War. By gathering the strands of the story, I hoped to set down a legacy that had been so carefully passed to me. I lived in a guest cottage on the kibbutz and spoke with Vitka each morning, or else she took me to some nearby kibbutz where other former comrades were living. If a person was unwilling to speak of the past, she would tell them I was a cousin of Ruzka's. They would look me over, smile and say, "Ruzka was wonderful. Let us speak in the garden."

Over a period of several weeks, these people told me in greater detail stories I already knew and also told me others I could never have imagined, stories they had never told anyone, the last great secrets of the War. When I asked Vitka why she had kept these things hidden, she frowned. Abba did not want these stories told, she explained. Israel was then living under a terrorist threat and Abba was afraid members of extremist groups might use his actions during the War as an excuse for their own behavior. Even more, he was afraid other Jews would not understand the life he had lived in Europe; removed from the context of war, his actions might seem brutal or cruel.

I asked Vitka why she had decided to tell the story now, and she talked about time and how things change. When Abba and Ruzka died, she realized that, if she did not tell their story, it might die with her.
One evening, on the kibbutz, Vitka led me into the fields, beyond the furthest porch light. A bird rose in the sky. Stars danced on the horizon. We reached a patch of manicured grass, each blade trembling in the evening breeze. Headstones were set in neat rows, dates of birth and death spanning the short history of the nation. On the edge of the cemetery, Vitka stood over two graves: Abba and Ruzka, buried just a few feet apart. To the other side of Abba, there was a third plot, an empty plot, which Vitka was careful not to step on. Vitka placed a small rock on each headstone, closed her eyes and said something under her breath. She looked at the ground, then back toward the kibbutz. "Come," she said. "Let's go home."

Excerpted from The Avengers by Rich Cohen. Copyright © 2001 by Rich Cohen. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Rich Cohen|Author Q&A

About Rich Cohen

Photo © Jerry Bauer

Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews and The Avengers. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, among many other publications. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He lives in New York City.

Author Q&A

Q: Who were the Avengers?

A: The Avengers were a group of young Jews, some still in their teens, who found themselves caught in the Holocaust; who, given a choice to get on the trains or to go underground, to die or to fight, chose to fight. Abba Kovner, who was the leader of the group, phrased the dilemma this way: "If we act cowardly, we die; if we act courageously, we die. So we might as well act courageously." The story centers around Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak. Vitka and Ruzka, who were from towns in Western Poland, had fled the German invasion on foot, walking clear to Vilna, which later became the capital of Lithuania, where they met Abba, a young Zionist leader. From then on, the lives of these three young people were entangled -- in love and in war. When the Jews of the city were locked in a ghetto, they formed an underground, smuggling and stealing weapons, spreading the call to revolt, going on raids. At nineteen, Vitka led a mission to the forest, where she blew up an enemy troop train -- the first sabotage in Occupied Europe. When the Germans liquidated the ghetto, Abba led the group through the sewers and into the forest, where they waged a guerrilla war. Joining with the Red Army, the Avengers fought their way back into Vilna, into the rubble of their old lives. At once, they knew their war had not ended, that they must carry on, finding a way to avenge the dead. They left Vilna, some disguised as German soldiers, some as concentration camp survivors. They devised a plan to kill scores of Germans -- Abba said six million to pay for six million. This is the story of what happened to the Avengers in the ghetto and in the forest, how they took revenge and how, fighting for the sate of Israel, they were able to build a new life.

Q: This story, which is set in the chaos after the Second World War, recently found its way back into the headlines, into current events. What happened?

A: For years, the story of the Avengers was kept as a secret among its former members. This was due mostly to Abba Kovner, who feared the behavior of his group, as partisans and avengers, could be used by enemies of Israel to excuse terrorist attacks. He was most concerned that his friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, would not understand the hard decisions he had been forced to make during the War. Removed from its proper context, his behavior might seem brutal and cruel. In the ten years since Kovner's death, however, some of the surviving Avengers -- about fifteen of them are alive -- began to tell bits and pieces of their stories. One of these scraps found its way to Nuremberg, where the Avengers had poisoned the bread eaten by former German SS soldiers. (To those who have grown up with the stories of the concentration camps, such stories of vengeful, violent Jews, can be shocking.) A few months ago, a German prosecutor opened an investigation into two of the men who painted on the poison. Murder charges seemed to be in the air. Former Avengers considered the prospect: Jews who had seen their entire families wiped out would be put on trial by the descendants of the killers. A few days ago, perhaps bowing to the political pressure, the prosecutor dropped his investigation. It is strange to see the past turn up in the present. It only furthers my belief that the past is never really past, that it is where we have been living all along.

Q: You are related to Ruzka, one of the key players in this story. What is your relation to her and what was her role in this underground movement?

A: Ruzka was the only member of my grandmother's family to survive the Second World War. My grandmother, who had left Poland when Ruzka was just ten years old, learned of her survival five years after the War. In the early 1950s, my grandmother visited Ruzka in Israel and returned to us with her story. Ruzka is, in many ways, the hero of this book. When she was still a teenager, she fled the Nazi invasion, hiked two hundred miles to Vilna, and, when the Nazis took that city, joined the underground. She taught herself to build bombs, sabotage trains and shoot a gun. When the ghetto was liquidated and the Jews were sent to concentration camps, Ruzka fled with Abba and the other members of the underground through the sewers of the city and on to the forest, where she blew up trains and trucks. While the war was still being fought, Ruzka traveled to Bucharest, where she met with Jews from Palestine. Abba wanted Ruzka, who had a powerful presence, to tell the story. He said, "You will be believed." Ruzka went to Palestine, where she was the first Jew to bring the story of the Holocaust and the War in the East. In the weeks after her arrival, she met with dozens of Israeli leaders, including Chaim Weizman and David Ben-Gurion. She later served the Avengers as a sort of point person, setting up meetings and arranging get-aways. Recently, on my way out of Israel, I was questioned by an airport security guard, a young woman soldier who asked why I was in the country. I told her that I was writing a book. She asked what the book was about and I mentioned Ruzka. The girl leaned back and said, "Ruzka, the partisan?"

Q: How come this story has never been told before?

A: As I have said, it was not told mostly at the insistence of Abba, who thought it would make the Avengers look like criminals, like killers, and not like the soldiers they believed themselves to be. Abba was afraid that they would be seen as terrorists and classed with those groups who were waging war on Israel. Also, in the past, the time had not been quite right for this story. The Holocaust has long be taught -- for the most part -- as a single narrative, the narrative of the concentration camps. The story of the Avengers is new in that it exists outside this narrative. It is the story as it was seen from the east, through the eyes of those Jews who decided to fight. It is a story of soldiers.

Q: What kind of research did you do for this book?

A: This story comes from those who lived it, former partisans and Avengers who are still living in New York, Israel and Europe. I did most of my research with Vitka Kovner, one of the three main characters in my book and the only one who is still alive. A few summers ago, I moved into a guest house on the kibbutz where Vitka lives and spent my days with her. She told me her story and took me to other towns where other survivors were living. Often, she translated for me. In such discussions, I was building on other stories, which I had heard since I was a boy, stories told by Ruzka and Abba in Israel or on their trips to the United States. I also spent much time with Ruzka's children, who are my cousins, and with Abba and Vitka's children. I toured sites where Abba fought for Israel in the 1948 War on Independence, and I spoke with scholars and survivors. Also of great help were Ruzka's war time writings and the letters she sent to Vitka. I spent a month driving around Eastern Europe, meeting with former partisans, communists who never left Poland, and seeing, with my own eyes, the places where the partisans fought and the Avengers plotted. Mostly, the story I am telling is a personal story, a story of three people and how they carried each other through the war, and it comes from their letters and writings and memories

Q: Which of the Avengers are still alive? Where are they living?

A: About fifteen are still living, some in the United States, most in Israel. Vitka lives on the kibbutz where she has been since the War. Each day, she does her work as a child psychologist. Lebke Distel, who poisoned the bread in Nuremberg, and a few other Avengers, are living on a kibbutz two miles south of Vitka. Other surviving Avengers are in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Haifa and New York. Each has their own memories and secrets, which, after years of keeping, they still find very hard to give up. In encounters with these people, the name Ruzka, and the fact that she was my cousin, was like a magic key, opening doors that had been locked for fifty years.

Q: Some call the Avengers heroes, others call them murderers. How do you respond do this?

A: The Avengers should be seen in the context of the war that had killed their friends and families. The Germans took everything they had. Are we surprised that the Avengers acted like people with nothing to lose? They had been brutalized by the war. In a sense, the war had remade them in its own image. The true genius of Abba, Vitka and Ruzka was their ability to move beyond war, to escape brutality, to re-establish, in Israel, the values of normal life. To me, this was the true meaning of their revenge. Without a doubt, these are some of the great heroes of our time.

Q: In your previous book TOUGH JEWS, you bring to life the story of the Jewish involvement on the world of organized crime. How come today when we think of organized crime we think of Capone and Corleone but not of Lansky and Siegel?

A: The legendary Jewish gangsters of Murder Incorporated are the victims of a stereotype that tells us that Jews are not gangsters, that Jews are not tough, that Jews do not fight. If there is a Jew in jail, he is a white collar criminal. If there is a Jewish gangster, he is the brains behind the muscle. Well, the gangsters I wrote about were the toughest men on the street in New York. Yet, when it comes time to tell the stories, writers and directors leave out the Jews out, often with the thought that this image of a Jew -- Pittsburgh Phil Strauss cursing his way to the electric chair -- is not believable. In a sense, the story of the gangsters is connected with the story of the Avengers; the Avengers too act in a way outside the stereotype of Jewish behavior. For this reason, the story of the gangsters was often not told -- Jews don't do that. The same is true with the Avengers -- a story that has often not been told because it does not conform with our expectation of Jewish behavior.

Q: You received great acclaim, but also some criticism for TOUGH JEWS. Who and why did some criticize you for this work?

A: For the most part, the criticism of Tough Jews was of this variety: "Why are you telling these stories? Don't Jews have enough problems? Why do you want to give people a reason to hate Jews, to kill Jews." To this, my response has always been, "If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that the people who hate Jews or would kill Jews do not reason." If anything, examples of Jews living outside stereotype, whether they be villains, like the gangsters, or heroes, like the Avengers, will only prove to Jews that any life is open to them, the good or the bad, the weak or the strong.

Q: What is next on the horizon for you?

A: I am currently working on a book about my early years on the shores of Lake Michigan, about my struggles with neighborhood bullies, about heeding the lessons of the school yard, about trying to look cool, about losing it all on the forced march to adulthood.

Praise

"A tremendous story."
--The Washington Post

"Fascinating... His language is spare and muscular, his descriptions evocative, his technique suspenseful. He is moved by this story and he moves us."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Rich Cohen has done a first-rate job."
--The Denver Rocky Mountain News

Reader's Guide|About the Book|Author Biography|Discussion Questions|Suggestions

About the Book

"A tremendous story." —The Washington Post

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Rich Cohen's The Avengers, a riveting and powerful look at the intrepid individuals who fought against the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of Europe.

About the Guide

In 1944, a band of Jewish guerrillas emerged from the Baltic forest to join the Russian army in its attack on Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. They called themselves the Avengers, and were led by a charismatic young poet named Abba Kovner. His chief lieutenants--who also shared his bed--were two seventeen-year-old girls, Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak. Despite their youth, Vitka and Ruzka were utterly fearless partisans who were central in carrying out the operations of guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. When the ghetto was destroyed and its inhabitants sent to their deaths, the Avengers escaped through the city's sewage tunnels to the forest, where they lived for more than a year in a dugout beside a swamp, fighting alongside other partisan groups and ultimately bombing the city they loved, destroying Vilna's waterworks and its power plant in order to pave the way for its liberation. Later, Abba and his followers hatched a daring plan of revenge upon the Nazis, even as they also aided surviving Jews in emigrating to Palestine. Ruzka traveled to Palestine before the end of the war, and was the first to tell incredulous Jewish leaders there what had happened to the Jews in Europe.

Rich Cohen first heard Ruzka's electrifying story as a child visiting his father's relatives in Israel. From subsequent conversations with Ruzka and the other central characters, he has produced a fascinating piece of history that fills some of the gaps in our knowledge of how a handful of Jews survived the Nazi death machine, and how they fought back with fierce energy and resistance.

About the Author

Rich Cohen has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and GQ, among many other publications. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Cohen is also the author of Lake Effect. He lives in New York City.

Discussion Guides

1. "It is like no Holocaust story I have ever heard. There are no cattle cars in it, and no concentration camps. It takes place in underground hideouts and forest clearings, and in the ruins of German cities after the Second World War" [p. 3]. So begins Rich Cohen's book The Avengers. Clearly Cohen is drawn to the story of Abba, Ruzka, and Vitka because of its powerful difference from most Holocaust stories that Jewish children are told. What is the effect, particularly upon a child's mind, of having the Holocaust as a formative narrative of identity?

2. As in Tough Jews, Cohen is driven by a discomfort with the idea of Jews as passive victims. Does The Avengers alter the impression that Jews were led "like sheep to the slaughter"? Why were the partisans largely unsuccessful in getting Jews to join them in resistance to the Nazis? Is it troubling that Abba, Vitka, and Ruzka left members of their own families behind in ghettoes that would eventually be taken by the Nazis?

3. What are some of the possible ethical responses to the genocide the Nazis engineered? Is the Talmud's "an eye for an eye" a more appropriate response than the Christian concept of "turning the other cheek"? Was Abba Kovner's plot to poison Nazis in the Nuremberg camp a sensible and moral response? On page 213, Cohen calls Kovner a "fanatic," the leader of a group of avengers whose "mere existence was their victory." Should Kovner be considered a fanatic, a hero, or both?

4. Cohen implies that for the partisans, fighting back put them in a strange position at times. With the massacre of civilians carried out in the pro-Nazi town of Konyuchi, the line between the partisans and the Germans became blurred: "The rebels sat for hours at the campfire, asking themselves, 'Who are we?'"[p. 145]. How did this conflict of identity affect the partisan cause? How were they able to justify their own use of violence?

5. The Catholic nun who helps the partisans tells Vitka, "In this situation, a Jew is the only decent thing to be" [p. 40]. Who are some of the other quietly heroic people who come into play in the story? Does The Avengers give a sense of why such people were ultimately helpless in changing the tide of events as the Nazis liquidated ghetto after ghetto throughout Europe?

6. Rich Cohen occasionally uses the techniques of fiction in telling his story, manipulating narrative point of view and verb tense. See, for instance, the first full paragraph on page 177, or the final full sentence on page 188. What effect do these moments have? On whose testimony does the factual basis of the story rest? How much imaginative reconstruction, in the interest of telling such a riveting tale, might Cohen have had to do?

7. Photographs of the story's three protagonists appear on pages 151-52. Cohen writes, "You can reconstruct a moment from this picture: the fading light, the shock of return, the sense of no victory" [p. 152]. What in fact can be gathered from the photographs--here and elsewhere in the book--of Abba, Vitka, and Ruzka, in various poses and at various times of their lives? What sense does the reader get of their different personalities, and the ways in which their individual characters were shaped by experiences during the war?

8. To what degree did a youthful commitment to Zionism shape the choices made by Abba, Vitka, and Ruzka? How important was the political ideology of Zionism to their lives in Israel? How did their commitment to Zionism change over the years?

9. When Ruzka departed for Palestine, Cohen says, "For the first time, [Abba and Vitka] lived as a couple, perhaps sensing the life they would spend together. . . It was the end of the life they had lived with Ruzka and the beginning of something new" [pp. 166-67]. What role might their triangulated relationship have played in the motivations of Abba, Vitka, and Ruzka, both during the war and afterward? Is there, as Cohen suggests, an element of romantic drama in this aspect of the story?

10. Given that Jewish leaders in Palestine, immediately after the war, were caught up in their struggle to found a Jewish state, is it surprising to find that they had little interest in Abba Kovner's plan for revenge against the Germans? How did Kovner himself come to realize that it was time to turn his energies toward the future of Israel and away from his desire for retribution?

For discussion of THE AVENGERS and TOUGH JEWS:

1."I've taken it upon myself, though not with any real plan, to challenge stereotypes of Jewish history," Rich Cohen has said. "One is the idea of Jews as passive objects of history and the other is Jews as victims. . . . The Avengers was a natural outgrowth of the first book, part of the same project, which was to look back and tell history with the breadth with which it was lived. These weren't Jews that were saved when somebody else was saving the Jews, although those people are in my book too. These were Jews who saved themselves." What do Rich Cohen's two books have in common, and do they reflect their author's effort to challenge popular stereotypes? How, in each case, does he fulfill his desire to "tell history with the breadth with which it was lived"?

2. Cohen points out that several of the Jewish gangsters were strongly anti-Nazi during the war, and that Bugsy Siegel might have been involved in an assassination attempt against Goering and Goebbels. The gangsters "understood Nazis in a way most law-abiding adults could not" [p. 189]. Are there similar qualities of toughness--or a refusal to be bullied--in the protagonists of his two books? Why do some brave and nonconformist people become criminals, while others become heroes?