Upon The Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today - Hardcover

Gruber, Ruth Ellen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471595683 ISBN 13: 9780471595687

Publisher: Wiley, 1994

Synopsis

A detailed description of the homes, synagogues and workplaces along with the practices and beliefs that comprised the Jewish world of Eastern Europe for hundreds of years until the Holocaust, including an intimate look at who and what remains today. Layers excerpts from oral histories, literary reflections and poems with the author's own interviews, research and photographs to form a rich, multi-dimensional tapestry of a vanished world.

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Reviews

A compendium of elegy, emotive description, and thorough research capturing past and present Jewish life in East-Central Europe. Freelance journalist Gruber (Rescue: The Exodus of Ethiopian Jews, 1987, etc.) walks us through what used to be the core of Jewish civilization in Europe. Today, fewer than 120,000 Jews live in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, a region once home to nearly 5,000,000 Jews. Between the fall of 1989 and the summer of 1993, Gruber visited the area in an attempt both to recreate the shattered past and to present a contemporary picture of the survivors' world. Her personal reflections often distract us from the subject, but her archival finds and the testimonies she has elicited from survivors and gentile neighbors offer a fascinating glimpse into largely unexplored areas of Jewish history. Gruber's cameralike eye is especially effective in surveying medieval bastions of Jewry like Prague, where she shows ornate synagogues--complete with domes, choir lofts, organs, and other objects that reflected the affluence and worldliness of Czech Jews. Unlike the poorer Jews of rural Poland and Hungary, many of these Prague Jews are shown to have abandoned basic Jewish customs and cultural knowledge. By the 20th century, their eagerness to assimilate with their non-Jewish neighbors had driven the intermarriage rate to unprecedented levels. Perhaps even more surprising is the evidence of a slow resurgence of Jewish identity in select Polish cities like Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Lodz. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, active Jewish study groups have formed, even though ``being a Jew or coming from a Jewish background can still be very uncomfortable for a Pole.'' A rich assemblage of Jewish history, but with the disconcerting organization of a patchwork quilt. (50 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Before the Holocaust, east-central Europe was home to nearly 5 million Jews; about 120,000 live there today. In Gruber's travels, she found answers to such questions as, Who now lives in the places where Jews once lived? What memories are retained about what it was like when there was a Jewish population? What do people born after the Holocaust know about the Jewish past? What use is made of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries? In seeking the answers, Gruber probed the matrix--and the memories and perceptions of the matrix--in which the Holocaust happened and then places this in the context of present-day circumstances. The author talked with an ever-dwindling number of survivors and with non-Jews, and searched through abandoned synagogues, graveyards, study houses, and ghetto streets in countless towns, cities, and villages in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. It is a sad and moving book, diligently researched, offering an objective look at the destruction of a centuries-old Jewish civilization. George Cohen

The area of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic was once home to almost five million Jews. Today fewer than 120,000 live there. Gruber (Jewish Heritage Travel, Wiley, 1992) traveled throughout the region to probe contemporary Jewish life there and explore its connection with a richer and more glorious past. She describes Jewish life and heritage in Prague; wine merchants and Hasidic dynasties in Hungary and Poland; synagogues in and around Budapest and the architect of many of them, Lipot Birnbaum; and Kazimierz, the ancient Jewish quarter of the Polish city of Cracow. Gruber concludes with a moving chapter on her visit to Auschwitz. Neither a history nor a travel guide, this study gives us snapshots of contemporary Jewish life coupled with historical sketches of a more vibrant past. Important more for the mood evoked than for the information provided, it is recommended for larger Judaic studies and popular collections.
Mark W. Weber, Kent State Univ. Lib., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471595683
• ISBN 13: 9780471595687
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320