Book Review: Eli’s Promise

​BY MARCIA R. RUDIN

The year is 1939. With the horrors of the Holocaust approaching, Eli Rosen, his wife Esther, and their 5-year-old son Izaak are trapped in Lublin, Poland. In 1946, Eli and Izaak are living in a Displaced Persons camp in post-war Germany as Eli searches for his missing wife and attempts to rebuild his life. In 1965, now in America, Eli continues the quest for justice he promised himself and his son he would pursue.
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Ronald H. Balson, a trial attorney and educator who won a National Jewish Book Award in 2018, relates Eli’s journey in Eli’s Promise (St. Martin’s Press, 2020), a historical novel, by alternating between these three time periods. What connects them is Eli’s relationship and confrontations with an unscrupulous German Nazi collaborator, Maximilian Poleski...

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