AUTHORS OF THE JEWISH DIASPORA

A new edition of Dana Fast’s war memoir, Good in the Midst of Evil (Clearfork Publishing) has been released. Originally published in 2011 as My Nine Lives: A Memoir, the suspenseful story tells how eleven-year-old Dana escaped the ghetto by assuming a false identity as a Catholic.
Born in Warsaw in 1931 as Lilka Miron, Dana’s comfortable childhood took a devastating turn in 1939 when the Germans occupied Poland and forced some 400,000 Jews from all over Poland to live within the walled ghetto. Her family made two attempts to flee Warsaw, first by train and then by horse-and-buggy. Both failed. In summer 1942, surrounded by starvation and death in the Ghetto, Dana’s parents relied on strangers–who risked their lives and the lives of their own children—to smuggle Dana and her brother out.

Dana Fast trained as a chemist at Warsaw Polytechnic and had a successful career as a medical researcher in Israel and the US. She moved to the Adirondacks in 1974 to work for the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake and the Walton A. Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid. Dana became a Master Gardener with the Cornell Cooperative Extension Program and kept scientific gardening journals for over 40 years, recently digitized by Curt Stager at Paul Smiths College because of her meticulous tracking of weather patterns. Dana became an ADK 46er and with her daughter Yvona hiked with the Adirondack Mountain Club across England. She was honored as a 2022 Woman of Distinction by Assemblyman Billy Jones.
Yvona Fast was born in Poland. As the daughter of a survivor, she lived on three continents and spoke three languages by the time she was ten. She attended SUNY Cobbleskill, Oswego, and earned a masters in Library Science from Geneseo. She worked as the librarian (1984-89) at the Adirondack Correctional Facility in Ray Brook and then in Yugoslavia, Poland, and Slovakia. She turned her attention to writing and her first book was published in 2004. Since 2005 she is a food columnist for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and has published articles and poems. She has a half dozen children’s books that are submission ready.

Nancy Sinkoff is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University. She is author of, most recently, “From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The New York Intellectuals, and The Politics of Jewish History. Forthcoming is the edited volume, Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery. Nancy is an ADK 46er, #9079.

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