A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe - Hardcover

Kaufman, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670867470 ISBN 13: 9780670867479

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1997

Synopsis

Spanning nearly a century, from the years preceding the Holocaust to the defeat of the Nazis and subsequent triumph of Communism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the present day, Jonathan Kaufman tells the stories of five families. A Hole in the Heart of the World is both a descent into the still-dark soul of Eastern Europe and a shockingly optimistic chronicle of a fragile cultural and religious birth. In Berlin a prominent Jewish family clings to its Communist ideals even after the end of the Cold War. A West German cantor - and concentration camp survivor - crosses the Berlin Wall to minister to the Jewish remnant in East Berlin. In Hungary a rabbi turns dissident when Communist-controlled Jewish leaders dismiss him, but he continues to teach Hebrew class in his living room, waging an underground war to preserve and nurture Jewish life. Young citizens of Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest find a renewed faith and pride as they uncover a secret heritage buried in the rubble of war and long condemned by the Communist regime. A Polish Catholic woman bears silent witness to the sufferings of her Jewish neighbors during World War II and later discovers something that overturns everything she ever believed about her past.
From the old to the young and the disenchanted to the enthusiastic, each arrives, finally, at a place of cultural and religious renewal. A Hole in the Heart of the World is a luminous portrait of the Jewish life that persists, though transformed and tenuous, as a vital element of the European community.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan Kaufman is a page-one feature writer for The Wall Street Journal.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A beautifully written account of two generations in five Jewish families living in West and East Berlin, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Kaufman, a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of Broken Alliance: Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America (1988), organizes his accounts around two seminal events: the defeat of Nazi Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He writes movingly about the many personal, cultural, and religious resonances of the Holocaust on Jewish life. One of his subjects is a Polish woman who was hidden by a Catholic family during the war, was raised to think of herself as an ``ordinary'' Pole, and learned almost by accident, and in her mid-30s, that she is Jewish. But Kaufman is particularly engrossing on the less well known and complex relationship between Eastern European Jewry and Communism. He provides a balanced account of how and why Jews were disproportionately represented in the leadership of most Eastern European countries; in 1949, for example, 7 of 13 members of the Hungarian Politburo were Jews, although Jews constituted only about one percent of the population. On the other hand, several of his subjects suffered physical and emotional torture under Stalin-like anti-Semitic purges, such as the Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia during the early 1950s. Kaufman seems by far the most engaged by, and offers the most detail on, his two families in West and East Berlin: respectively, a Holocaust survivor and his historian son, and a Communist party leader and his dissident son. And unlike so many accounts that depict Eastern Europe as a kind of extensive cemetery for Jewish life and culture, this book provides real, if modest, evidence of Jewish resilience and renewal. This is a work of exemplary journalistic research and narrative, one highly recommended for anyone interested in either contemporary Jewry or the new Europe. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0670867470
• ISBN 13: 9780670867479
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336