Tri-Continental Jew: A 20th Century Journey

ISBN-13: 9789655651270 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 312 str.

Ernest Stock

Opis

I offer this memoir as a contribution to the speculation on the nature of Jewishness, which has become such a timely subject, one fraught with political implications. I would not, however, see it as leading to a single definition of Jewishness. The latter's character, as I perceive it, changed radically with each shift in location. In my native Germany, it was formally religious: Jews defined themselves as German citizens of the Mosaic faith. This held true until the Nazi government decided that the Jews were a race, and eventually formalized its decision in the infamous Nuremberg Laws. These excluded Jews from every level of national life - social and political, cultural and professional. The resulting ghettoization at first strengthened communal solidarity, along with individual Jewish consciousness, but this turned out to be a short-term delusion. No communal structure could withstand the government's determination to rid itself of its Jewish population. Still, in my own case the forced transfer, in third grade, from a public to a Jewish parochial school laid a solid foundation for what was to come. Upon leaving Germany, I came well prepared to play my part in Jewish life in Alsace, France, where I spent the first eight months of my exile. The encounter with new types of individuals and institutions in the bracing air of freedom led me to look upon Strasbourg Jewry in particular as the optimum to which a non-sovereign Jewish community might aspire. Alas, the outbreak of war in September 1939 brought the idyll I discovered across the Rhine to a sudden end.