Avrom Bendavid-Val, author of The Heavens Are Empty

Join us as we co-sponsor Avrom Bendavid-Val, author of The Heavens Are Empty at the 60th Annual Diamond Jewish Book Fair.

Trochenbrod was a small village in the Ukraine with a large Jewish community of mostly farmers.

And then it disappeared.

First the Soviets invaded the town; then the Nazis turned it into a ghetto. By the end of the war, fewer than 40 Jews from Trochenbrod remained.

Avrom Bendavid-Val’s grandfather and father lived in Trochenbrod, and the two men often spoke of a charming little town far apart from the rest of the world, a place with seven synagogues, a candy store, bakeries, furniture makers, a restaurant, and where life was happy.

Today, Trochenbrod (the setting for Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, where it is called Trachimbrod) is only dirt and fields. In The Heavens Are Empty, Avrom Bendavid-Val brings it to life.