The Millions
A Year in Reading
Ruth Franklin. December 15, 2020
The most significant of these was Tehran Children, in which the Israeli writer Mikhal Dekel investigates the route her father took as a Holocaust refugee, deported from Poland to a forced settlement in the Soviet Union and then to a collective farm in Kazakhstan before being airlifted from Tehran to Palestine in 1943.
World Literature Today
University of Oklahoma
The Odyssey of the Tehran Children: Mikhal Dekel’s Story of Holocaust Survival
Tehran Children is a testament to the herculean efforts of people across the globe to save human beings and the incalculable value of their work.
Jewish Review of Books
A Story of Commitment, Solidarity, Love Even
By Allan Arkush
Summer 2020
In Tehran Children, Dekel succeeds, to an extraordinary degree, in evoking her parents’ pain as well as in provoking reflection on the nature of belonging. Precisely because her book avoids any facile conclusions, it leaves an indelible impression.
Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs
Escaping the Nazis by Way of Iran
By Michael Traison,
June 18, 2020
“Dekel is an excellent and experienced writer and her descriptions are remarkably vivid, telling this exodus story in a style reminiscent of a Jules Vernes novel. One easily gets lost in these pages and can see, feel, and breathe the environment almost as if one were an eyewitness to the events described, or even a participant.”
JDC Bulletin
“Meticulously researched and beautifully written.”
— Isabelle Rohr,
Quantara (Germany)
“It is one of this book’s great strengths that Dekel works out this specificity for all the stops along her father’s journey, and at the same time seeks connections with other stories of escape.”
—Daniel Walter
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