Shetl: The History of A Small Town and an Extinguished World Book

Most of the German extermination camps were built on Polish soil, and there has been a tendency on the part of historians of the Holocaust to assume a simple model whereby traditional Polish anti-Semitism led to Polish complicity. As Eva Hoffman's parents, Polish Jews who survived, found out, it took the help of many benevolent gentiles for a Jew to survive; you only needed one betrayer to die. This account of the complex relationship between Poles and Jews and in particular of the typical small mixed town of Bransk, stresses the fact that for most of its history, Poland was the least anti-Semitic of European states; in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Jewish refugees flocked there and prospered--and if their relationship with their neighbours was distant and prickly, it was no worse than that. Jews and Poles suffered equally when Poland was partitioned by its ruthless neighbours; it took 20th- century nationalism and elements within Catholicism to institutionalise anti-Semitism in a newly independent Poland. Eva Hoffmann's Shtetl account pulls no punches, but is the book of a woman as proud of her Polish roots as of her Jewish ones; this is a useful history and a tribute to the role of memory.--Roz KaveneyRead More