Return of the Jew traces the appearance of a new generation of Jews in Poland that followed the fall of the communist regime. Today more and more Poles are discovering their Jewish heritage and beginning to seek a means of associating with Judaism and Jewish culture. Reszke analyzes this new generation, addressing the question of whether there can be authentic Jewish life in Poland after fifty years of oppression. Based on a series of interviews with Jewish Poles between the ages of 18 and 35, her study provides an illuminating window into the experience of being, and for many becoming,...

This volume is a brief history of the Jewish community of Volodymyr-Volynsky, going back to its first historical mentions. It explores Jewish settlement in the city, the kahal, and the role of the community in the Va'ad Arba Aratsot, and profiles several important historical figures, including Shelomoh of Karlin and Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher (the Maiden of Ludmir). It also considers the city's synagogues and Jewish cemetery, and explores the twentieth-century history of the community, especially during the Holocaust. Drawing on survivor eyewitness testimonies, the author pays tribute to the...

This book takes the reader through Dr. Wlodzimierz Szer's childhood in Yiddish prewar Warsaw, adolescence and imprisonment in wartime Russia, to the brutal reality of immediate postwar Poland, and the years of the socialist regime. Although largely autobiographical, the book provides a historically and intellectually compelling analysis of the social and political situation in Poland and Soviet Russia from the early 1930s to 1967.

To Kasieńka from Grandpa is a document of a personal and family memory, authored by Artur Lilien-Brzozdowiecki (1890‒1958) in 1944/45. This memoir, which was written in Polish and translated to English for the family circulation alone, now becomes a public asset. Lilien invites his new-born granddaughter to encounter her family, generations of Polish Jewry: merchants, lease-holders, bankers, industrialists, politicians, communal leaders, army officers, scholars, physicians, artists, and art collectors. They dwell in a broad Jewish and Christian world, integrated into the...

After sixty years, Kristine Keese is finally able to share the memories of her years spent in the Warsaw Ghetto as a small child. She owes her survival, and that of her young uncle, to the striking resourcefulness of her mother. The story emerges as vividly as if it happened yesterday, full of details that only a child would notice. Although the the events of the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of its victims has been described many times, Keese's story is exceptional, as it is told through the eyes of, not a victim, but a child engaged with her daily reality focused on survival.

This volume is a brief history of the Jewish community of Volodymyr-Volynsky, going back to its first historical mentions. It explores Jewish settlement in the city, the kahal, and the role of the community in the Va'ad Arba Aratsot, and profiles several important historical figures, including Shelomoh of Karlin and Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher (the Maiden of Ludmir). It also considers the city's synagogues and Jewish cemetery, and explores the twentieth-century history of the community, especially during the Holocaust. Drawing on survivor eyewitness testimonies, the author pays tribute to the...

This story of Krystyna Bierzynska, an acculturated Polish Jew, explores how she survived the Holocaust thanks to the efforts of her Jewish and surrogate Christian families and served in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Bierzynska's is a Warsaw story that demonstrates how, in urban interwar Poland, acculturated Jews at last dared to believe that they qualified as Polish patriots.

This story of Krystyna Bierzynska, an acculturated Polish Jew, explores how she survived the Holocaust thanks to the efforts of her Jewish and surrogate Christian families and served in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Bierzynska's is a Warsaw story that demonstrates how, in urban interwar Poland, acculturated Jews at last dared to believe that they qualified as Polish patriots.