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Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish History
by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

The 20th century is over.  Yet displaced survivors of its horrific wars and murderous “ethnic cleansings,” and their descendants now scattered throughout the world, are still haunted by the places they or their ancestors once called “home.”  Many have made it their mission to research familial and cultural pasts, to revisit ancestral homes and to retrace the steps of lost family members, even when their initial information is scant.  This longing for the past continues well into the twenty-first century and, in fact, is fueled by the enhanced possibilities for research offered by the Internet and even by DNA and genetic testing.  Many important and minor sites that have long ceased to exist enjoy an active afterlife on the world wide web with websites devoted to them, listservs with growing memberships, and lively communities exchanging pictures and stories about their own or their parents’ past.  This desire to reconstruct lost worlds seems to cross-generational, national, and ethic lines. 

We write about the afterlife in memory and history of one such place, Czernowitz – a city in Eastern Europe where, until its shattering and dispersal in the era of the Second World War, a large and assimilated -- predominantly German-speaking -- Jewish community once flourished.

Initially fascinating to us was the fact that Czernowitz, as a political entity, had in fact ceased to exist in 1918, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire in the aftermath of World War I.  Yet throughout its subsequent iterations – Cernauti under Romanian rule, Chernovtsi, under the Soviets – its Jewish inhabitants continued to live there as though not much had changed.  They held on to what the Habsburgs had been able to offer Jews – emancipation and the promise of social integration and equality, in exchange for linguistic and cultural assimilation to Austrian ways of life.  Even those who survived deportation and immense suffering under fascist/Nazi domination continued to maintain and to transmit to us -- the postwar generation -- strongly positive, nostalgic memories of a tolerant multi-ethnic city and culture that had long disappeared in reality.  At the very same time, however, they also transmitted traumatic memories of persecution, deportation, displacement, and the loss of home. 

Ghosts of Home follows several generations of people from this city and their descendants. Through interviews and oral accounts, memoirs, family albums, objects and memorabilia, and through a number of trips to present-day Chernivtsi (now Ukraine), we tell a multi-stranded story about twentieth century European Jews.  Parts of that story are familiar: the story of Jewish assimilation and secularization, of the German-Jewish symbiosis that was to turn so tragic, of the encounter between fascism and communism, of the lure of Zionism and Hebrew, and the equally powerful lure of diaspora nationalism and Yiddish, and, of course, the story of the Holocaust.  But, situated at the crossroads between East and West, and between the Soviet and Western spheres, Czernowitz also offers unknown stories about the fate of Europe’s Jews: stories of resilience, rescue and survival, of choices made in impossible circumstances, of the continuation of normality under extremity, of the perpetuation of the dream of multi-ethnic tolerance against immeasurable  odds.  In this first historical account in English of Czernowitz, we bring this dream to life, but we also show how the search for the past can result in active engagements with the present, even when that present is located across the world. 

To read the book's preface or to order this book, please click here ►►

Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret
by Steve Luxenberg

"The homework assignment seems clear enough: Do a family tree. I turn the paper sideways, and in no time at all, I’ve filled Dad’s side with brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, first and second cousins, more than two dozen names from Michigan and elsewhere. I’ve met them all at one family gathering or another, so I can jot down their names and draw the lines without asking Dad or Mom for help.

On Mom’s side, though, I’ve reached a dead end after just three names—Mom, Bubbe and Zayde. I’ve heard Mom mention an uncle, but I don’t know his name or where he lives or whether he’s related to Bubbe or Zayde. And did Mom once say something about a cousin, or am I making that up? " Read more ►►

The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn
by Ellen Levitt

"Jewish life in Brownsville, East New York, Flatbush-East Flatbush, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other nearby areas of Brooklyn through the 1950s was a lively, rich and varied environment. Over the next few decades it dissipated greatly. As Jews moved to other areas, they left behind their synagogues. The 'Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn' is a photographic essay of these ex-shuls; what happened to them, and how they appear today. Many became churches whose facades still have Jewish symbols.

The book offers photographs, interviews and analysis on ninety-one of these former Jewish houses of worship. Some have been faithfully preserved while others are in disrepair. Described in the book are memories of Jews who belonged to these old congregations as well as the Christians who now fill the pews. All this is supported by extensive research and stirring stories..."
To read a few excerpts from this book, click here ►►

This book can be ordered by clicking here.

Harvest of Blossoms: Poems From a Life Cut Short
by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger

"Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger died in a Nazi SS labor camp on December 17, 1942. She was eighteen. In the course of a life cut short, Selma reached out to the world with poetry, and her words grabbed life, even as the world around her was slipping into an arena of death. During these grim times, she wrote more than fifty poems in German and translated another five from Yiddish, French, and Romanian. With startling honesty, she wrote about love and heartbreak, desire and loss, injustice and marred hope. Selma found beauty in the fragility of chestnuts, comfort in the loneliness of rain, and grief in rural poverty and, with despairing courage, faced a future that wanted her--and an entire way of being--to 'fade like smoke and leave no trace' ('Tragedy')..." more ►►

The Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia: A History and Guide 1881-1930
By Harry D. Boonin

The Jewish quarter was the area around 5^th & South Streets in Philadelphia where immigrant Jews began to settle after the 1882 Russian and Polish pogroms.  Soon the area was crowded with pickle barrels, pavement salesman, peddlers, market hucksters, horse droppings, small shop owners, sewing machine operators, runners going to and fro from wholesale clothiers, sweatshops, synagogues, Yiddish theatres, immigrant banks, bathhouses, mikvehs, yeshivas and Talmud Torahs.  These sites, sounds and smells are described in the book which Stephen Frank—Collections Curator, National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia—wrote is “…fascinating – full of wonderful detail and color…” more ►►

This book can be ordered by clicking here.

Messiahs of 1933:
How American Yiddish Theatre Survived Adversity through Satire

From the author, Joel Schechter:

"The book opens with discussion of Nadir’s play, Messiah in America, and a speculative discussion of what might have happened if his play, as well as Yiddish language and culture were more widely known by Americans in the 1930s.  I suggest that Yiddish stage satire was not as far removed from mainstream American culture as it now appears to be; the language in which it was performed kept it separate from other political and popular theatre, but it made important contributions to American culture..."  more ►►