Mikhal Dekel is professor of English at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. For this book, she was named a finalist for the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, and the Chautauqua Prize.
"""... a highly personal, journalistic memoir and a valuable addition to Holocaust history... What makes Dekel’s study so valuable is not just its assiduous detailing of one family’s fate during the second world war, but how it also makes us reflect on our current era, with its mass migrations of desperate people fleeing conflict and hardship only to meet inflamed nativism and the desire to shift responsibility for their fate from one country on to the next."" -- The Guardian ""Tehran Children is the story of Dekel’s quest to understand where her father came from […] that speaks to the terrors of the twenty-first century."" -- Times Literary Supplement ""The story at the center of this book is the way contingency shaped so many destinies. It makes these Tehran children not simply another detail of the Holocaust but a matter of enduring existential, psychological and moral reflection."" -- Jonathan Brent - The New York Times Book Review ""... intriguing story…"" -- The International New York Times ""Groundbreaking... The strength of Dekel’s book is that it moves beyond the narrative binary of “warm hospitality” and “abuse” to show the grey spaces in between... it is hope that lies at the center of this moving, heartbreaking testimony... hope that untold suffering can, and sometimes does, come to an end."" -- Arash Azizi - Iran Wire ""Part-history, part second-generation memoir, Tehran Children sheds light on a previously neglected episode of the Holocaust."" -- Jerusalem Report ""... compelling and personal narrative...This book is an important part of Holocaust history. A tragic story, full of sadness and suffering yet also hope."" -- Methodist Recorder"