THE BACKSTORY: From Siberian camps to Bronx Jewish Hall of Fame

Miriam Hoffman has led a full and accomplished life, including work as an author, scholar, journalist, playwright and social activist. She has written textbooks, won awards for her plays and even founded the Joseph Papp Yiddish Theatre. Life has taken her from Siberian gulags to the displaced-persons camps of post-World War II Germany to Columbia University, where she recently retired after 25 years as a professor of Yiddish language and culture. This week, life took her to The Bronx, where Hoffman (inset) was inducted into the Bronx Jewish Hall of Fame, joining other 2017 induct- ees such as architect Daniel Libeskind and TV anchor Marvin Scott. (The initiative was started in 2015 to honor Jewish individuals from The Bronx and their achievements.)

This week also marked the launch of Hoffman’s book, “A Breed Apart: Reflections of a Young Refugee” (Yiddishkayt Press), a book she describes as a personal journey that depicts a “miraculous i escape from the hell of a Russian s slave labor camp to the freedom of personal expression and self-realization available only in my beloved United States of America.”

And yet, sadly, despite the 68 years that has elapsed since 1949, when she emigrated to the United States, things have not altered all that much.

“The world has not c changed. As I look l around dt today, d I see the same brutal- ity and inhumanity that I describe in this book continue. The news from Putin’s Russia seems eerily consistent with my tales of Stalin’s Soviet Union,” she writes.

“The slave labor camps of North Korea are still functioning to enslave innocent victims just as the Siberian gulag did in my lifetime. The crematorium in modern-day Syria performs the same function as Hitler’s multitude of gas chambers and their accompanying furnaces. Anti-Semitism, hatred, prejudice and extremism are still prevalent, and the world remains silent.”