A lucid and comprehensive chronicle of the perils of postwar
European Jewry. Wasserstein (History/Brandeis Univ.), an authority
on wartime British Jewry, again captures the neutral but engaging
tone of his award-winning The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln
(1988). He covers the changing complexion over time of how the
continent's Holocaust survivors were treated and why. The book is
careful not to make generalizations about emigration policies to
pre-1948 Palestine, for instance, because each nation's
relationship to Britain was a controlling factor. Wasserstein makes
some telling points by way of minor facts that he chooses to
include; he informs us that burial grounds for Polish pogrom
victims were turned into a football field; that only 1.5 percent of
the DPs that Britain absorbed were Jewish; and that in the postwar
era more Jewish homes in France had Christmas trees than Hanukkah
menorahs. Beyond the Stalinist purges, the Slansky affair in
Czechoslovakia, and the Klaus Barbie trial in France, the book
offers chapters tracing the demographic, cultural, and religious
trends across the continent. We learn that by the 1960s the Jewish
fertility rate in the Netherlands was half that of the gentiles,
that German-Jewish writers preferred exile to return (like Nellie
Sachs to Sweden), and that the long, painful progress in interfaith
relations between Nostra Aetate and Vatican II took a long detour
around the Auschwitz convent crisis. While a popular historian
might describe the Diaspora's rejuvenation after Israel's Six-Day
War in glowing terms, Wasserstein reminds us that "in many European
eyes, Israel was now seen as too big for its boots and as a
persecutor rather than a victim." The bibliography underscores just
how many books are concentrated within this essential one-volume
text. It is likely to be a standard in its field for decades - more
time than Wasserstein gives the vanishing diaspora of Europe.
(Kirkus Reviews)
In 1939 there were ten million Jews in Europe. After Hitler there
were four million. Today in 1996 there are under two million. On
current projections the Jews will become virtually extinct as a
significant element in European society over the course of the
twenty-first century. Now, in the first comprehensive social and
political history of the experience and fate of European Jews
during the last fifty years, Bernard Wasserstein sheds light on the
reasons for this dire demographic projection. Drawing on a rich
variety of sources, many hitherto unpublished, Wasserstein begins
with the painful years of liberation after World War II when Jews
tried to recover from the destruction of their people and
communities, then traces the Jewish experience in Eastern and
Western Europe in different national and ideological contexts. His
important and original inquiry covers the impact on Jews of postwar
reconstruction, Soviet occupation, the Cold War, and the collapse
of communism. These, combined with the memory of Nazi genocide, the
persistence of antisemitism, the development of Israel, and the
Middle East conflicts, shaped the history of European Jewry in the
second half of the twentieth century. With exceptional eloquence
and conviction, Vanishing Diaspora argues that survival for
European Jews ultimately will depend on choices they themselves
make to reverse trends. They have an alarmingly imbalanced
death-to-birth ratio, and many have jettisoned religious observance
in the spirit of a secular Europe, losing their cultural
distinctiveness as well as their numbers. This often painful story
of destruction, irreparable loss, and the shattering of ties thus
serves as a wake-up call and a dramatic warning.
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