Adam Pascow has been banished. Along with all the Jews in Warsaw, he is confined to the Warsaw Ghetto. Forced to leave behind his job, his belongings, his home, even his cat, his only plan is to try to ride out the tumultuous political climate that accompanies every war. He’ll then go back home and move on with his life.

Except things never really go as planned, do they?

As Adam participates in a plan to document the truth of what went on in the Jewish ghettos of World War II, he begins to understand how dire their circumstances really are. Surviving becomes the ultimate priority. However, as he bonds with the other inhabitants of his forced living space, he also realizes that not all decisions are as easy and obvious as they once appeared.

As Adam struggles to align his head and his heart, as World War II rages on unabated, a beautiful and heart-wrenching story unfolds. Grodstein weaves a beautiful tale while reminding us that horrors of war are never too far behind us. The lessons learned in Ghetto Warsaw are still applicable today. As we have so wisely been warned, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

3.5 ⭐️

Adam Paskow is part of a collective tasked with archiving the lives of Warsaw ghetto residents through interviews. It also tells the story of how Adam came to the ghetto and what he had to do to survive.

I loved the premise of the book, and even though I enjoyed it, it fell a little flat for me.

One thing I really enjoyed was how brave the children were. It warmed my heart and at the same time made me anxious because I just wanted them to be OK.

If you enjoy reading about the Holocaust, this book is a recommended read.

A historical fiction set in the time period of World War II, but thankfully we are not inside a concentration camp, but conditions are close in this Warsaw Ghetto. A teacher, Adam Paskow is living in an apartment with two other families as they are just trying to survive until this war ends. Adam is asked to document the lives of those living in the Warsaw Ghetto and recording the big and the small of life inside in hopes that it can be shared when all is said and done.

While I do read a lot of historical fiction, I tend to limit my reading of World War II books because it all just seems so sad and while I am not denying the horror of it, I don't want to read too much of it. This one sounded interesting from the synopsis and it lived up to my wonder of how this author would share this community at this time. I loved how Grodstein made me feel the humanity of these characters, they weren't just a number in a war, but instead we learned of their back stories and I liked reading the mundane of the day to day survival of it all.

My first read of Lauren Grodstein and will by no means by my last. I would love to read her two previous novels and then I surely hope for more in the future. This is a book I will recommend to readers who haven't read a lot of World War II AND for those who feel they have read it all!

I appreciate that, outside of memory flashbacks, this book is essentially centered within the walled boundary of the ghetto. There is talk of the outside, even of deportation, but everything that happens to Adam and the other characters stays within their walled prison.
I didn’t know if I wanted to finish this book. Something about the tone made me question whether I wanted to push towards the end. I am glad that I finished it, though. I am glad that I could see the characters' storylines wrapped up; even those left in an ambiguous state, I still feel closure in what I think their future probably held.

Historical fiction at its best a story of Ww2 of life in the Warsaw Ghetto.The people we are introduced to come alive and you can feel the danger there in due to being Jewish during the war.A story that will stay with me an author to follow.#netgalley #algonquinbooks.

Lauren Grodstein's WE MUST NOT THINK OF OURSELVES is exceptional. In the story of the Warsaw Ghetto, Grodstein's vivid prose and spot-on dialogue brings to life a story of love, courage, betrayal, hardship, the unthinkable and unforgettable large and small events. The settings and the moments were wonderfully drawn and the characters so engaging and believable, I felt totally immersed in a little known and understood reality we brushed by when studying history. I will never forget this book, illuminating our current times while telling a story of long ago. A beautiful, important book. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

Historical fiction books set during the Holocaust are often difficult to review. The subject matter is so sensitive and tragic and it has been written about so much in recent years. However, it’s still such a rich setting for novels, so I think it’s important to keep reading these books and critiquing them appropriately.

“We Must Not Think of Ourselves” (written by Lauren Grodstein) follows Adam Paskow, a Polish Jew who ends up being tasked with the job of archiving people’s experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. The character is fictional, but is based on a real-life group called Oneg Shabbat who had the goal to preserve and document the lives of the Jewish people in the ghetto during that time. Adam interviews several people during his time there (mostly his friends and housemates) to try to understand them better and to have a record of their stories. The story also covers Adam’s life with his wife, Kasia, who died before the war even began and his current fight to survive while so many Jews were dying around him.

I felt like the book really came alive when Adam was interviewing people. Everyone’s stories were heartfelt and depicted what life was like for many Polish Jews before and during the war. I did feel like there was a bit too much back and forth with time periods though – every time there was a scene about Adam’s wife or his life before the war, I felt disconnected from the story. I was also disappointed in how little closure there was for many characters – the book ended abruptly too. I would have loved some kind of epilogue that described the fate of all of the characters, Adam especially. I understand that for many people the Holocaust caused this kind of uncertainty – people didn’t always know what fate befell their neighbors or friends. But as a reader, I was left wondering too much for the story to feel satisfying in the end.

Grodstein is a very capable writer, especially when she’s depicting heartbreaking scenes of violence or inhumanity. These scenes were written with the right amount of shock and horror (and even respect for the victims). I just wish there had been more of a focus on the interviews and the Oneg Shabbat project and less scenes set in Adam’s past. Tying up those loose ends also would have made this novel more successful in my eyes.

It’s difficult to read Holocaust stories, but that doesn’t keep me from reading them. It’s always for me so important to remember those who were killed or those who survived the unimaginable. Everyone should remember, so it doesn’t happen again. That’s exactly what this book is about - creating a way to remember. Adam Paskow, an English teacher in the Polish ghetto keeps a diary of people’s stories, their life before, their dreams, to preserve the memories so they are not forgotten. We meet a variety of characters in Adam’s circle who he interviews.

Eleven year old Filip, fascinated by dinosaurs can no longer go to the library to read about them, so he carves them out of wood and stays on the rooftop of the apartment to be away from everyone. He played football until they kicked him off the team to be “cautious” because he’s Jewish. This and the other interviews of children and others that Adam records are heartbreaking. It’s so important to see these people in the light of who they are , the lives they led to get a grasp of what was lost. And of course, it’s gut wrenching, as we learn what happens to Szifra, a young woman who does what she needs to do to protect her family, to feed her brothers. There are other horrific scenes that Adam reflects on as be encounters them in his daily life .

“I felt myself grow itchier as we walked south, toward their house; there were corpses on the street, covered with newspapers that fluttered in the wind. We pretended not to see them. A withered arm, a leg. On the sidewalk, children begged for scraps of food. “

“This morning. as I walked through the ghetto for my pail of soup, I saw the Nazis cordoning off a building on Chlodna Street. On my way back, they were removing its inhabitants at gunpoint, forcing their hands behind their necks. Even the children. The ones who stumbled were shot. The mothers who wailed were shot.”

I’m amazed at the resilience that I found here in spite of all that happened. The novel is based on true archives and some of these diary entries can be found today in the Oneg Shabbat Archive in Warsaw. A worthy addition to Holocaust literature. Highly recommended .

I received a copy of this book from Algonquin through NetGalley.

Adam Pascale was a 40-year-old childless widow a professor of languages and he was sent to the Warsaw ghetto by his Catholic father-in-law… For his own good. When he first arrived he had ideas about his self and although a non-practicing Jew he was a Jewish man still and all. he would stay in a one bedroom flat with the whisk off family in another family of four making them nine people in a little bitty flat but they may do and got along. One day while teaching a man name Emmanuel Ringelblum. Asked Adam to become the eyes and ears of the Warsaw ghetto and make a record without opinion of everything he sees. He takes time to do interviews with his flatmates his students but what he doesn’t record is how much he misses his wife Cassia and his blooming feelings for the wife of one of his flat mates Sala and how horrible things are getting. When brought to the ghetto he took as many valuables as he could and slowly but surely so as not to starve to death he pawns everything but the last thing is the most precious and can bring him the biggest reward but by the time this happens Adam although having sold everything will be leaving the one thing that brought him happiness while living the hell that he did. This was a really good book I loved how with his interviews not only did they mainly serve a historical purpose but also gave voice to those who thought they had nothing to say this was a horrible time in our history and I’ve never heard of this project before and I am a big fan of reading eyewitness accounts of historical events so will definitely look more into this. There’s way more to this Book then my review states and I believe books helps broaden our perspective and let’s us see how similar we are as opposed to being different in this book certainly does that. I want to thank Algonquin and Net Galley for my free arc copy please forgive any mistakes I am blind and dictate my review. project

This book was incredible. I loved the Jewish voices, the storytelling was amazing, and the writing was fantastic. I am not usually a fan of WWII novels but this one is a stand out.

A character driven portrait of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Adam, a young widower, has been teaching English and working in a soup kitchen when he's given a task by the Oneg Shabbat- to document life. He interviews multiple people, from children to the elderly, and it is their stories that are most compelling. These are linked by snippets of life under the Nazis, the brutality, the hunger, the cold, the misery but there is also an underlying sweetness to Adam. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. Like so many entries in the genre. it's often hard to read.

This book was a perfect story of no good choices. Inspired by true events, Lauren Grodstein has written a thoughtful and heartbreaking story about Oneg Shabbat, testimony gathering. I really enjoy historical fiction, especially when based on true people and events, however, I've not read anything set in the Ghettos during WWII. This book was heartbreaking yet thought provoking. Stories like this must be written, shared and remembered. Thanks #NetGalley #AlgonquinBooks

When books come out that are centered around WWII, I usually am drawn to them.
While We Must Not Think of Ourselves is set during WWII, it was a little unique from the other books I've read on the subject matter as it was not set in a concentration camp, but rather a ghetto. An open air prison, if you will (sound familiar?).
Adam is an English teacher who is widowed and is tasked to write about the people of the ghetto. Interviewing them about their lives before the ghetto while seeing how they live now. These people are being memorialized before they even really knew what was to come. I liked this concept for the book, but it also fell a little flat in the fact that I never got to truly know the characters besides a little of their pasts.
Adam was forced out of his apartment and made to live in another apartment with other families. While there he does his interviews and falls in love with another man's wife. All this while living a life without many of life's necessities. Life is hard and children are forced to smuggle, steal and barter for their families in order to have food put on the table. The stories that Adam gets to hear about really humanizes the people of the Ghetto and is a reminder that they ARE Humans and deserve so much more. I feel like that was the heart of the story. The "diary entries" of each person was just that. A telling of what had happened to them in the past. It made you see that they were there and they were people. Not random families all forced to live in squalor in small apartments with strangers. In that respect, we got to live an experience that these people could only remember. I just didn't feel fully connected to anyone because it seemed very base level. Just being told what was going on. I wanted more of what was happening on the outside. But the parts we got were just before concentration camps and we were getting just a taste of the violence they experienced at the hands of evil.

Overall, this was a good story, but I felt disconnected from most characters besides Adam. I wish we could've gone deeper with the people he lived with in the apartment, but we did get to feel that these people were worth more than they were given. A promising story that could've pushed further. 3.5 stars.

Reading books set during the Holocaust is always tough. This took me a while to get into, because it was (of course) such a grim premise. But once I started to dive into the story, I was captivated. The book does a great job of illustrating how it felt to live in the Warsaw Ghetto. The initial hopefulness for things to end as soon as the war shifts, followed by the slow descent into despair. The characters become hungrier, more desperate, and more numb over time. By the time you get to the trains at the end, the pacing was well done enough that you can sympathize with the desperate residents who willingly line up for the promise of increased rations.

The book also grapples with the idea of what makes a "good" person. These characters are in an impossible situation and make due with what they can. No one is perfectly innocent, which makes the characters feel more vivid.

Speaking of which, characterization is another thing I felt was done well. You slowly learn more about the characters through Adam's interviews and his thoughts; two perspectives that offer a more complete picture. You see how they each react to their circumstances, and flourish or flounder. I find that most books make children annoyingly precocious or indistinguishable from one another, but this book does a nice job of showing how each child is different. Some of the character endings were easy to see coming, but how could you not see how things would end for those making riskier moves?

My only disappointment was where the story ended. On one hand, it ended at the perfect time: the point of hope. What happens after is open-ended enough for the reader to dream something up. On the other hand, I felt the impetus for the ending happened so fast, and I wanted to linger a bit more with the characters before saying goodbye. I wouldn't mind a little epilogue, or a sequel set in the future from the perspective of one of the boys.

Overall, a good read for anyone interested in historical fiction from this time period.

Thanks to NetGalley for the e ARC of this novel. An incredibly moving book based on the Oneg Shabbat archives from the Warsaw Ghetto, which I had not heard of before I read this book. A rabbi tasked particular residents to create a record of life in the ghetto, including the testimonies of other residents. The records of those interviews were buried in milk cans and later dug up after the war. This is a fictionalized account of an English teacher who is tasked with interviewing residents for the archive, largely his students and some of their parents. The fictional interviews of the children and his interactions with them in the classroom provide a timeline of their lives and dreams and concerns before and after the ghetto. The English poetry taught in the classroom, as refracted through their current lives, appears frivolous and calls up much deeper moral questions to children who have become the essential black market traders that keep their families alive, or what is left of them. The adults in the ghetto seem less resilient, hanging onto logic when there is none and maintaining habits to little purpose. A vivid portrait of a short, exceptionally brutal period of history that does justice to the people who lived it.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves, by Lauren Grodstein, tells the horrific story of the entrapment of Warsaw's large Jewish population in a tiny portion of the city, and subsequently starved, degraded, and systematically exterminated the vast majority of them. Grodstein's protagonist, Adam Paskow, is an English teacher, and may be modeled on one of the major real contributors to Emanuel Ringelblum's actual Oneg Shabbat Archives. Only three of the contributors survived the total destruction of the Ghetto. This is a well-written novel that tries very hard to avoid trivializing or sanitizing this historical hell. The characters are as realistic as we might imagine them to be. Nonetheless, an unnecessary and improbable romance was at best distracting. My real objection to this story is that it ends abruptly and too early. There is no mention of Jewish resistance or the Uprising which ultimately failed. However, it disconcerted the Nazis and forced them to concentrate resources. More it importantly, it sparked resistance in other camps and ghettos. Thank you to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for allowing me to read a digital ARC.

“We Must Not Think of Ourselves” by Lauren Grodstein tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto through the eyes of Adam Paskow, a young widower and Teacher. The book takes place when the Jews were being rounded up and placed in the ghetto of Warsaw, Poland. Adam becomes a part of a secret archival project code named Oneg Shabbat.

I was interested to learn that Oneg Shabbat is an actual group of people who preserved and collected the stories of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto. I was very interested to learn about this aspect of history. I did not know that the Oneg Shabbat existed. The creation of the Oneg Shabbat was the preservation of people’s stories knowing they would not likely survive long enough to tell the stories themselves.

The book reads like a journal entry. Unfortunately for me the story fell flat for so many reasons. While this particular time and place in history is heartbreaking, the author did not use the opportunity for the reader to feel anything. There were so many parts of the story where you wondered how they got food, clothing, etc. Things just shows up because someone smuggled it. How did they get these things, what risks did they take, how hungry were they? While the main character is a Jew he is not a practicing one. He has no drive and simply accepts things as they happen. The reader see’s Adam teaching students and gleaning information for the Oneg Shabbat. That is it. The lack of detail is one of my biggest complaints. This is a compelling historical moment and the characters were not dimensional. There was no bond between the reader and the characters. The title even leads the reader to believe that there is depth to this novel.

I would like to thank Algonquin Books and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book: We Must Not Think of Ourselves
Author: Lauren Grodstein
Rating: 2 Out of 5 Stars

I would like to thank the publisher, Algonquin Books, for sending me an ARC. This is another one of those cases where it’s not the book, but me. I did truly want to like this one, but I could not get into it. It was missing something that made it impossible for me to create any kind of a bond with both the characters and the plot, which is heartbreaking. This is a Holocaust story and it should have torn me in two, but it didn’t.

This one is set in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto. We follow Adam, who is a teacher and has been tasked with recording the lives and struggles of those who live in the ghetto. While the stories in this book are fiction, they are based on actual people, which should have added a hard punch. As Adam starts to speak to people, he learns about their past, hopes, and dreams. The story is hopeful, as people believe that their situation can only improve and not get any worse. It’s about finding strength in a world that has only kept knocking them down.

This setup should have brought us the terror and uncertainty that people living in the ghetto were going through. Yet, it felt like the author was going through the motions of merely telling the story instead of letting it hit us as it should. Instead of letting us see what these people are going through, we are told about it. Now, I have not read the source material, so maybe the way Lauren describes it in the book is how it is in the original content. Things are bad and people are holding onto hope. It’s what we do. However, we are only told that people are starving and the Nazi solider cause fear. We don’t get to see the actions and see the how and the why. We are only told. The idea of staying positive overshadowed the true horrors that these people were going through. I know everything does not have to be all about the bad, but I feel like if we had gotten a little bit more of that, then the idea of having hope and looking forward would have hit home.

I hate to admit it, but I did have a very difficult time connecting with the characters. We have these people of great strength who can be a rock in the worst of times, yet there is no connection there. The characters’ voices did not develop in a way that allowed for them to be their person. It felt like everyone was the same. While I am aware that they were all going through the same shared experience, this does not mean that their voices should be the same. Everyone has different perspectives and experiences when going through something. It’s why we have so many stories and so many different understandings of the world around us. This book did not give me that. I think that had we gotten some little character moments and gotten a lot more detail, the punch with the characters would have been there.

The lack of detail is the biggest reason why I could not get into this one. I think that had the scenes been developed a little bit more and had the characters’ voices been able to take form, this would have been a five-star read for me. Yet, those little things that were missing prevented me from having any kind of bond and connection to the story. It made it seem, to me, that we were merely going through the motions of having a Holocaust story instead of allowing it to hit us as it should.

Overall, this was just a miss for me. This does not mean that it’s a bad book.

This book comes out on November 28, 2023.

Thank you to NetGalley & Algonquin Books for this ARC!

This novel set during WWII is different from the other WWII based novels that I have read. Rather than taking place in one of the concentration camps, We Must Not Think of Ourselves takes place in a ghetto and follows the life of Adam Paskow once he is made to leave his apartment and move in with two other families into one apartment. Life in the ghetto is not easy- food is extremely limited, children become traders & smugglers for their families to have food, curfew is given, & the German soldiers shoot at any provocation. Adam teaches English to his few students that come while attending meetings & gets an assignment to record stories from life in the ghetto of people he knows. He talks to his students & some of their family members, but they tell stories of their lives before the ghetto.


This novel is important to show the lives of the Jewish people who were rounded up by the Germans and forced to live in ghettos without many basic necessities. Typhus and lice were rampant and many died in the ghettos before being moved to the concentration camps.

I enjoyed this novel to an extent, but it was very character driven. I think I was expecting more to take place during the novel, and the plot felt very slow moving. The ending was abrupt and some of the chapters did not flow well with the rest of the novel.

Newly imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, Adam begins keeping a journal of daily life, from the crowded apartment he shares with nine others, the English lessons he gives to children, and frantic attempts to escape before time runs out. Haunting.
Thank you to Booklist and NetGalley for the arc!