From that Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 - Softcover

Dawidowicz, Lucy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813543622 ISBN 13: 9780813543628

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2008

Synopsis

From that Place and Time is the memoir of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-Jewish historian who set out to study Yiddish language and Jewish history at YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland, in 1938. Escaping Poland only days before the Nazi onslaught, she worked in the New York YIVO during the war, and returned to Europe from 1946 to 1947 to aid Jewish displaced persons in Munich and Belsen with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz's memoir not only describes her pre-war year in Jewish Eastern Europe, but also treats the ghostly post-war period, and her role in salvaging what remained of Vilna's scorched Jewish archives and libraries.

Nancy Sinkoff's new introduction explores the historical forces, particularly the dynamic world of secular Yiddish culture, which shaped Dawidowicz's decision to journey to Poland and her reassessment of those forces in the last years of her life.

About this title

About the Author:

Nancy Sinkoff is associate professor of Jewish studies and history at Rutgers University, specializing in the history of Eastern European Jewry. She is the author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this deeply moving personal reminiscence, eminent historian Dawidowicz ( The War Against the Jews ) recounts the year she spent in Vilna, Poland, shortly before barbaric German troops swept in and murdered nearly all of that city's 60,000 Jews. Vilna no longer exists--Vilnius, the present-day capital of Soviet Lithuania, contains hardly a trace of the former city, which makes this poignant memoir all the more valuable. In 1938, Dawidowicz, a disillusioned 23-year-old radical and ex-communist of Polish-Jewish ancestry, embarked from New York for YIVO, Vilna's famed Yiddish Scientific Institute, to study Jewish history. Beggars filled the streets as the Poles' vicious anti-Semitic policies and actions accelerated pauperization of the Jews. Back in New York, working for YIVO's American branch, the author watched with rage and anguish as Europe's Jews were massacred and most of her Vilna friends murdered. She returned to occupied Germany in 1946, to work with Holocaust survivors in displaced-person camps. Her piercingly eloquent narrative gives us a sharp first-hand impression of a world in ruins and of the irreparable losses suffered by European Jewry.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0813543622
• ISBN 13: 9780813543628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Sinkoff Professor Nancy