September 2020

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Veteran newspaperman Samuel Isban accepts an assignment from the New York newspaper Der Morgn Zhurnal to report on Aliyah Bet,  the clandestine mission to smuggle Jewish refugees past the British blockade into Palestine.

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What follows is an eyewitness account from aboard a ramshackle vessel, manned by a crew of young volunteers and packed with a human cargo of 1,500 Jewish refugees from the concentration camps.

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About the Author

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Samuel Isban (1905–1995) was born in Gostynin, Poland and emigrated to America in 1937.

A prolific journalist and author in both Yiddish and Hebrew, Isban published numerous novels and short story collections.

 

 

What people are saying:

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“Completed in 1947 before the UN Partition plan and the declaration of a Jewish state . . . Isban brings a picture of Aliya Bet unaffected by the experience of the War of Independence and the shift to the view of the Arab as enemy.”

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 — Samuel Z. Klausner

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"Lively and loquacious [. . .] What sets Isban's book apart is that he tells his story as a witness and participant in the events described: these are no mere memoirs told after the fact, nor are they a literary repackaging of the official narrative. "Illegal Jews Part the Seas" is a historical document of the ideological struggle to gain support for Jewish statehood."

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Mikhail Krutikov, Forverts

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Also available from the same author:

On the Scaffolds​

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