The Legacy of Jewish Swimmers
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🕮 Karen Propp discusses her work in progress, Freestyle, a story of Jewish female swimming champs in Europe during WWII. The unpublished work won the 2013 Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries.
Freestyle is based on the true story of champion swimmer
Judith Deutsch and the Viennese Hakoah swim team of the 1930s, familiar
to some from the documentary film Watermarks. Despite being
selected by Austria to swim in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Deutsch and her
teammates boycotted the Olympics to protest the treatment of Jews in
Nazi Germany.
The novel covers two years in the life of Elly Hirsch, Propp’s fictional incarnation of Deutsch. The Award committee felt that Freestyle
with its strong sense of history, sympathetic characters, and little
known story, would appeal to a wide audience and epitomize the ideals of
Sydney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family series. Freestyle looks at the years of the Holocaust with a unique light.
CREDITS:
- Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel
- Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries
- Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band
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- Photo: Karen Propp with Manuscript Award Chair Aileen Grossberg
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