Displaced Persons: A Novel

“This is an amazing novel. The writing is piercing and clear, and the humanity of the author and her characters will inhabit my thoughts for years to come.”
—Anne Roiphe, National Book Award-winning author of Fruitful

An astonishing tale of grief and anger, memory and survival, Displaced Persons marks the arrival of a supremely gifted new literary talent, Ghita Schwarz. Schwarz’s powerful story of a group of Holocaust survivors—“displaced persons”—struggling to remake their lives and cope with the stigma of their pasts in the wake of the monumental Nazi horror is beautiful, tragic, moving, and unforgettable, chronicling the lives of ordinary people who have suffered under extraordinary circumstances.

In May 1945, Pavel Mandl, a Polish Jew recently liberated from a concentration camp, finds himself among similarly displaced persons gathered in the Allied occupation zones of a defeated Germany. Possessing little besides a map, a few tins of food, and a talent for black-market trading, he must scrape together a new life in a chaotic community of refugees, civilians, and soldiers. With fellow refugees Fela, a young widow, and Chaim, a resourceful teenager with impressive smuggling skills, Pavel establishes a makeshift family, as together they face an uncertain future. Eventually the trio immigrates to the United States, where they grapple with past traumas that arise again in the everyday moments of lives no longer dominated by the need to endure, fight, hide, or escape.

Ghita Schwarz’s Displaced Persons is an astonishing novel of grief, anger, and survival that examines the landscape of liberation and reveals the interior despairs and joys of immigrants shaped by war and trauma.

“Ghita Schwarz poignantly reminds us that history chases us even if we run from it and that memory ensnares us wherever we turn. Displaced Persons is a big, ambitious novel, yet what’s most striking is its humanity. Schwarz’s characters span continents and generations, but she draws them all with a startling deftness of touch. Displaced Persons is a terrific novel.” - Joshua Henkin, author of the New York Times Notable Book, Matrimony

“Ghita Schwarz makes her mark with this remarkable debut. Displaced Persons is a brave, brilliant, and haunting work of art.” - Colson Whitehead, author of JOHN HENRY DAYS and SAG HARBOR

“This is an amazing novel. The writing is piercing and clear, and the humanity of the author and her characters will inhabit my thoughts for years to come.” - Anne Roiphe, New York Times bestselling author of Epilogue: A Memoir

“Ghita Schwarz poignantly reminds us that history chases us even if we run from it and that memory ensnares us wherever we turn. Displaced Persons is a big, ambitious novel, yet what’s most striking is its humanity....[it] is a terrific novel.” - Joshua Henkin, author of the New York Times Notable Book, Matrimony

“An exquisite rendering of the internal lives of survivors” - Forward

“A haunting and memorable debut. . . . Fascinating” - St Louis Jewish News

“The immigrants hide truths from each other, making the science of lying one of Schwarz’s best subjects. In Displaced Persons, lying functions as a means of mercy as well as harm, a symbol of what both binds and threatens the Jewish community, whose imperfections Schwarz astutely illuminates....Schwarz’s smooth prose expertly, often amusingly adopts her characters’ tics of thought and speech....Displaced Persons—like the emigres themselves—gains strength in its later moments, concluding on a masterfully unresolved chord.” - San Francisco Chronicle

“An epic tale...” - The Brooklyn Paper

“In her warm portrayal of the postwar highs and lows experienced by Pavel and his family, Schwarz aptly evokes the emotions of those who survived.” - Publishers Weekly on DISPLACED PERSONS

“Poignant and sharp, this engrossing first novel takes a …look at a time and a people defined by deep inner strength. Recommended for a wide range of readers, and a perfect book club choice.” - Library Journal (starred review) on DISPLACED PERSONS

“A deft rendering of the emotional architecture of an ad-hoc family of Holocaust survivors.” - Vogue

“Schwarz ... captures perfectly, and with elegance, the highs and lows, the grief and anger, and the paranoia of these refugees. In a word, this is a ‘humane’ novel.” - USA Today

“Deceptively simple in style, Schwarz’s narrative discloses depths of tragedy, of suffering, and occasionally of hope…Stark, unadorned fiction, well worth reading.” - Kirkus Reviews

“In this powerful debut novel, author Ghita Schwarz, a child of Holocaust survivors, hypnotically spins the tale of a Polish Jew Named Pavel who bravely rebuilds his shattered life in the aftermath of World War II.... Schwarz brilliantly gives us the long view of what postwar survival really meant.” - Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers