In the Mountains and On the River chronicles the history of the Slovak Jews between 1848 and 1945. It is based on an in-depth historical investigation by the author Gabriel Groszman, numerous memoirs by members of his extended families and documents obtained from historical institutes in Slovakia, Italy, Israel and the United States. The narrative takes us through the successive periods of the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, democratic Czechoslovakia and the fascist Slovak Republic, culminating in the destruction of Jewish life in Slovakia during the Holocaust. The multi-generational family histories refl ect the shared destiny of Slovak Jewry and their achievements in spite of discrimination, followed by open persecution leading to exile, death, or in the case of a fortunate minority, survival. The stories of several families come to life through the written and verbal accounts of the survivors and descendents of people murdered during the Holocaust.

Gabriel Groszman was born in 1930 in a small Hungarian village. When he was 10 years old, his religious Jewish family moved to Budapest under the pressure of anti-Semitic laws. There he attended an Orthodox middle school until 1944, at which time Germany occupied Hungary. During the ensuing twelve months, his family struggled to elude the Nazi death trap. In 1949, they left the country, then under communist rule, for Vienna, where he began his university studies. Three years later, they emigrated to Argentina, where Groszman married, had three children, and built up a successful industrial company. In 2003, he moved with his wife to Florida. He published his memoir My Roots, My Destiny in Spanish in 2009, followed by the German and English translations in 2011 and in Hungarian in 2014. He published his second work, A Suitcase in the Attic, a chronicle of several families in the context of the history of German Jewry, in Spanish in 2012, in German in 2013, and in English in 2014. His third endeavor, In the Mountains and On the River, narrates the history of several Jewish families in Slovakia coping with the tumultuous events of the last two centuries. The English publication in 2016 will be followed by the German translation in early 2017.