Category Archives: Judaism

Milt Zolotow (z”l)

(with his daughter, Nina Zolotow)

Note from Nina: I want to tell you a bit about my father. He grew up in New York, the child of immigrants, with Yiddish as his first language and a fairly conventional Jewish upbringing, which meant he also learned Hebrew. During World War II, he served in the army and was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and ultimately occupied Germany, where his ability to speak Yiddish helped him understand German. Well, you can imagine that because of this background he had some interesting adventures in Europe. In his old age he outlined a memoir about his war years, which he never actually wrote. I cobbled together a one-sentence story years after his death about an experience he had in Germany. In it I use information and phrases from his outline, a kind of a posthumous collaboration, which you can read below.

During the occupation we were sent to a small German town near a camp for Displaced Persons, where all the DP’s were women, and someone had the bright idea of sending a truck down to invite any interested women to a dance we were giving—with musicians and food, too!— and when the truck filled with girls arrived, we brought out the schnapps and food, and soon there were couples making out in the bushes outside the cafe and everyone was as drunk as raw schnapps can make you, but then as I was drunkenly dancing with a pretty girl, I suddenly realized that I clearly understood every word she was saying because she was speaking to me in Yiddish, so after that I sobered up pretty quickly and listened as she explained to me that no one in the camp knew she was Jewish because she carried the identity papers of a Pole (she had jumped off the moving freight train carrying her to a death camp, found a young Polish woman who was roughly her size and coloring, and then she killed this woman, took her identity papers and lived as a Pole in a Nazi work camp) and that she had come to the dance to try some Yiddish phrases on everyone she danced with and finally succeeded in making contact with me (quite a miracle since there were only two Jews in my battalion and the other one was not at the dance), and all I could think to do was to take her back to my quarters and give her every bar of soap and carton of cigarettes I could find, however, that kind of backfired because when she returned to the DP camp laden with my gifts, she was immediately the center of hostile attention—no other girl had been so lavishly treated and suddenly suspicions rose: she was different, she was a Jew—and the officer running the camp saw the ruckus, knew she had to be separated, and phoned our HG to tell us what happened, so then I made some calls and found a quartermaster truck that was going south to a Mediterranean port, put the girl on it and got the GI driver to agree to put her on board a ship to Palestine, but later I learned that the British turned back all the Jewish refugees trying to get to Palestine, so I guessed she must have ended up stranded in some French waterfront town, and I still wonder if I did enough (I never heard another word about her because the very next day I was given a two-week pass for the French Riviera).

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

Milton Zolotow was born in New York City, the child of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Trained as a fine artist as well as a graphic designer, he enlisted in the US Army during World War II, hoping to join the map making division in New Jersey. Instead, he was assigned to a tank battalion and after training was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. Because of his drawing skills, he mainly did reconnaissance for his unit. But during the occupation of Germany, he was used as a German translator due to his knowledge of the Yiddish language, and his ability to speak Yiddish as well as some Hebrew and French also led him to have some interesting encounters with other Jewish people in Europe. After the war, he returned to New York City, where he created a body of war- and Holocaust-inspired artwork and where he met his future wife, Edith. After a couple of years of studying art in Mexico City, Milton and Edith settled down in Los Angeles, California, where they raised a family and Milton worked as a graphic designer and taught graphic design in art schools. In his retirement, he began to create black and white drawings that continued to explore imagery that evoked war and the Holocaust.