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From stories both told and untold, Genin recreates the lives of the Zwerling family in the Jewish quarter of Lemberg (Lvov): There is her strict, deeply religious grandfather, Shulim, the patriarch; his patient but tired wife, Dvoire; and his beautiful and rebellious daughter, Shayndl, who marries the dreamer Avram Genin against her father's wishes and without his blessing, and who will later become Salomea Genin's mother.
Stereotypical descriptions showcase West Germany as an "economic miracle" or cast it in the narrow terms of Cold War politics. Such depictions neglect how material hardship preceded success and how a fascist past and communist sibling complicated the country's image as a bastion of democracy. Even more disappointing, they brush over a rich and variegated cultural history. That history is told here by leading scholars of German history, literature, and film in what is destined to become the volume on postwar West German culture and society. In it, we read about the lives of real people--from German children fathered by black Occupation soldiers to communist activists, from surviving Jews to T...
A comprehensive account of Jewish life in a country that carries the legacy of being at the epicenter of the Holocaust. Originally published in German in 2012, this comprehensive history of Jewish life in postwar Germany provides a systematic account of Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st Century by leading experts of modern German-Jewish history. Beginning in the immediate postwar period with a large concentration of Eastern European Holocaust survivors stranded in Germany, the book follows Jews during the relative quiet period of the 50s and early 60s during which the foundations of new Jewish life were laid. Brenner’s volume goes on to address the rise of anti-Israel s...
Lala, a blonde, "Aryan-looking" Polish Jew, details her struggles to survive the Nazi occupation by passing as a Christian Gentile. The author now lives in Skokie, Il.
"The Orthodox rabbi Heshel Melamed's sudden death by heart attack in 1919 set his widow and children free to leave Lithuania, the country that he insisted be their home. In light of the Holocaust that took place in Europe twenty years later, his death became, ironically, a gift of life: Heshel Melamed's family left Europe before the war and settled safely in South Africa." "In Heshel's Kingdom, Dan Jacobson recounts his journey in the 1990s to post-Communist Lithuania, where he searched for traces of his grandfather Heshel's world. More than a genealogical narrative, however, this deeply personal memoir becomes at times a philosophical tableau of secularism, religion, family, and modern Judaism." --Book Jacket.
This memoir is a moving testament to the power of family. The Lucas clan was a close-knit, successful family of rural German Jews--butchers and meat dealers--whose strength and pride was challenged by the rise of Nazism. As the family grew, so did its prosperity and power, and the sons, daughter, and their relatives became known as the Sovereigns. But anti-Semites, under the protection of the Nazi regime, began to settle old scores, and targeted the economically successful rural Jews. New laws stripped Jewish meat dealers of their rights, and Aryan competitors eagerly forced them aside. That was only the beginning. In the Holocaust that followed, some members of the family escaped. Others did not.
"The memoirs of Jews who were children during the Nazi occupation of Poland This book serves as a memorial to loved ones who do not even have a grave, as well as a tribute to those who risked their lives and families to save a Jewish child. A wide variety of experiences during the Nazi occupation of Poland are related with wrenching simplicity and candor, experiences that illustrate horrors and deprivation, but also present examples of courage and compassion."--Publisher's description.
This is and English-language publication of a Holocaust memoir with a strong American dimension. It tells the story of Robert Goldmann's youth in a small village in Germany, his experience in the early Nazi years in Frankfurt, his forced emigration in 1939, and his subsequent career in the United States, including service with the Voice of America, brushes with McCarthysim, and a brief tenure as head of the European bureau of the Anti-Defamation League.
Arnošt Lustig's fiction has always been too close to the facts for comfort. In The House of Returned Echoes, he pays tribute to the life of his father, who died in Auschwitz in 1944. In Prague in the difficult time between the wars, a man fights to keep his family and his business alive despite anti-Semitism and economic hardship. Emil Ludvig has always relied on the simple rules of his family and the basic laws of civilization to counteract his misfortunes, and being a decent man himself, he refuses to believe that the Nazi threats will be carried out. Yet, he also becomes a victim of the camps, and his story resonates with both Lustig's personal experiences and the shared memories of the Holocaust.
New essays exploring the tension between the versions of the past in secret police files and the subjects' own personal memories-and creative workings-through-of events.