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A travel book in Yiddish by Henry Shoskes (1891-1964). Shoskes was born in Poland and fought inthe Bolshevik Revolution. After the war, he returned to his native Poland and was appointed inspector for the Warsaw Cooperative Bank. In the course of establishing a network of 600 branch banks, he traveled to nearly every town and village in Poland. In the 1930s, Shoskes joined the State Export Institute which sent him overseas on economic missions. On each trip he published an account of his travel impressions in a Warsaw newspaper. His newspaper writing was wildly popular. In a period of five years, he published six travel books covering Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States. In 1938, the government of Poland sent Shoskes to Iraq and Persia to conclude trade agreements. He sent dispatches in the form of eyewitness accounts of what he saw and experienced,which appeared in the European press. When the Nazis captured Warsaw, Shoskes escaped to Paris. General Sikoski’s government appointed Shoskes the Polish consul to Palestine.
Working to aid refugees and displaced persons during World War II, he was dubbed the “Ambassador of the Stateless.” In the course of his modern Odyssey, he was called friend by kings and prime ministers, political leaders and priests, magicians and tribal chiefs. Henry Shoskes . The war made it impossible for him to take up his post in country, so he was assigned a similar post in New York. After the war he became an American citizen, and in 1946 was one of the first to join the United Nations mission for UNRRA (United Nations Refugee Resettlement Agency), a post that took him back to Europe where he saw the devastation of Poland. Czechoslovakia and Germany. In 1948, Henry Shoskes was appointed overseas representative of HIAS, a job that became his life’s work. This enabled him to travel much of the world obtaining admission for thousands of people uprooted as a result of war and persecution, seeking safe havens. His work gave him unique access to heads of government and chief executives of social welfare institutions.
In 1948, thousands of refugees were stranded in China. Shoskes appealed directly to Galo Plazo Lasso, president of Ecuador. Jewish émigrés were being denied entry in Australia; Shoskes intervened with the government to lift visa restrictions. In Argentina, thousands of refugees entered the Republic via Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay. The Argentine police restricted them from renting housing, sending their children to school, or finding employment. Shoskes met with President Juan Péron and his wife Eva Péron in 1949 to plead for their intervention. The restrictions were lifted and the process of refugee settlement began in Argentina. While Henry Shoskes traveled the world meeting with heads of state on behalf of his diplomatic mission, he turned out travel columns in the Yiddish press and wrote five additional books of his travel adventures. His vivid and colorful travelogue take the reader through the bazaars of Calcutta and Bangkok. The reader travels to the opium dens of Thailand and meets men who live in the temporary bliss of an opium paradise. He is taken to a holy temple where erotic dancers hold the faithful in ecstatic rapture as the Emerald Buddha gazes down on them.
Shoskes was a remarkable travel writer, a man of courage, conviction, and a gift for sketching a moment of history that has nearly been forgotten. Even though Henry Shoskes wrote during a time of war, political strife and unrest, he wrote of his own accomplishments with humility and the unshakable belief of facing the future with optimism. |
