We Must Not Think of Ourselves
Lauren Grodstein's novel is set inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where in late 1940 an English teacher named Adam Paskow is approached by a clandestine group asking him to record his neighbors' lives. Modeled on the real Oneg Shabbat archive organized by historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the project asks Adam to keep notebooks of interviews, recipes, and small daily scenes. As conditions worsen, Adam falls in love with a married woman whose family shares his apartment and tries to decide what he is willing to do to stay alive. The novel works as a love story, a portrait of an archive in formation, and a quiet argument that ordinary lives deserve a record. Grodstein wrote the book after years of reading the Ringelblum testimonies.
What you might want to know about We Must Not Think of Ourselves
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An English teacher in the Warsaw Ghetto is recruited to interview his neighbors and bury their testimonies for whoever survives.
Jenna Bush Hager chose We Must Not Think of Ourselves as the December 2023 Read with Jenna selection on the Today Show, telling viewers it was a deeply human Holocaust novel that stayed with her and bringing Lauren Grodstein on to discuss the real Warsaw Ghetto archive behind the book.
Yes. Historian Emanuel Ringelblum led a secret group in the Warsaw Ghetto that gathered diaries, interviews, and documents, hid them in milk cans and metal boxes, and intended them to survive the war. Much of the archive was recovered after 1945.
We Must Not Think of Ourselves was written by Lauren Grodstein, published in 2023 by Algonquin Books.
We Must Not Think of Ourselves is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, We Must Not Think of Ourselves takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
We Must Not Think of Ourselves is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
