What was life like for Jews who wanted to return to their former homes in Europe after the Holocaust? In Home after Fascism, Anna Koch draws on a rich array of interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the first-person homecoming stories of Jews in East Germany, West Germany, and Italy and explore the variety of ways they reconnected to the countries that had destroyed their homes, ostracized them, and killed and imprisoned their loved ones. Even as returning Jews worked to recover lost or looted homes and possessions, they also struggled to make sense of their persecution and find a way to reclaim a sense of home. Essential to that reconnection, Koch argues, was the development of "emotional communities," which helped returnees process and reinterpret their feelings toward the countries they had fled for their lives and safety. Jews in West Germany emphasized detachment and marking their distance to justify living in a "country of murderers"; communists of Jewish origin in East Germany stressed an emotional connection to their comrades; and Italian Jews' emphasis on the historical attachment to their homeland highlighted their belonging within the national community of Italy. Comparative, wide ranging, and often moving, Home after Fascism? reveals the determined resilience of a displaced generation of Jewish people following different paths across Europe to recover the feeling, reality, and power of home.

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism  by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.  

What was life like for Jews who wanted to return to their former homes in Europe after the Holocaust? In Home after Fascism, Anna Koch draws on a rich array of interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the first-person homecoming stories of Jews in East Germany, West Germany, and Italy and explore the variety of ways they reconnected to the countries that had destroyed their homes, ostracized them, and killed and imprisoned their loved ones. Even as returning Jews worked to recover lost or looted homes and possessions, they also struggled to make sense of their persecution and find a way to reclaim a sense of home. Essential to that reconnection, Koch argues, was the development of "emotional communities," which helped returnees process and reinterpret their feelings toward the countries they had fled for their lives and safety. Jews in West Germany emphasized detachment and marking their distance to justify living in a "country of murderers"; communists of Jewish origin in East Germany stressed an emotional connection to their comrades; and Italian Jews' emphasis on the historical attachment to their homeland highlighted their belonging within the national community of Italy. Comparative, wide ranging, and often moving, Home after Fascism? reveals the determined resilience of a displaced generation of Jewish people following different paths across Europe to recover the feeling, reality, and power of home.