 |
'IRON KINGDOM: THE RISE AND DOWNFALL OF PRUSSIA, 1600-1947' CHRISTOPHER CLARK |
 |
Walking Since Daybreak A Story of Eastern Europe World War Ii and the Heart of Our Century Modris Eksteins |
 |
We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust Ellen Cassedy Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them. (20120417) |
 |
Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity Gershon David Hundert Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world--an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century.
The experience of eighteenth-century Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not fit the pattern of integration and universalization--in short, of westernization--that historians tend to place at the origins of Jewish modernity. Hundert puts this experience, that of the majority of the Jewish people, at the center of his history. He focuses on the relations of Jews with the state and their role in the economy, and on more "internal" developments such as the popularization of the Kabbalah and the rise of Hasidism. Thus he describes the elements of Jewish experience that became the basis for a "core Jewish identity"--an identity that accompanied the majority of Jews into modernity. |
 |
Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning Shaul Stampfer One of the key ways in which the traditional Jewish world of eastern Europe responded to the challenges of modernity in the 19th century was to change the system for educating young men so as to reinforce what were seen as time honored, conservative values. The yeshivas at that time in Lithuania became models for an educational system that has persisted to this day, transmitting the talmudic underpinnings of a self-consciously defined traditional Jewish way of life. To understand how that system works, one needs to go back to the institutions they are patterned on - why they were established, how they were organized, and how they operated. This book is the first properly-documented, systematic study of the three key Lithuanian yeshivas as they existed from1802 to 1914. It is based on the judicious use of contemporary sources - documents, articles in the press, and memoirs - with a view to presenting the yeshiva in its social and cultural context. Pride of place in the first part of the book is given to the yeshiva of Volozhin, which was founded in 1802 and was marked by a novel structure - total independence from the local community. In many respects, it was the model for everything that followed. Chapters in the second part of the book focus on: the yeshiva of Slobodka, famed for introducing the study of musar (ethics); the yeshiva of Telz, with its structural and organizational innovations; and the kollel system, introduced so that married men could continue their yeshiva education. The book also covers the leadership and changes in leadership, management and administration, the yeshiva as a place of study, and daily life. This English edition is based on the second Hebrew edition, which was revised to include information that became available with the opening of archives in eastern Europe after the fall of communism. |
 |
The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 Mr. Timothy Snyder Modern nationalism in northeastern Europe has often led to violence and then reconciliation between nations with bloody pasts. In this study, Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian nationhood over four centuries. He discusses various atrocities (including the first account of the massive Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s), and examines Poland's successful negotiations with its newly independent Eastern neighbours, as it has channelled national interest toward peace. |
 |
There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok Yaffa Eliach This is the history of a singular yet representative Jewish community from its origins in the Middle Ages to its destruction during the Second World War. For 900 years, this Polish shtetl was a home to generations of Jewish families. In 1944, almost every Jew in Eishyshok was murdered, and with them died a way of life that had survived since the eleventh century. Yaffa Eliach was four years old when the Nazis entered the town and machine-gunned all but thirty-six of its inhabitants. She and her family hid for two years in forests and in a tiny cellar beneath a pigsty. She has devoted the last seventeen years to documenting the stories of the other inhabitants of Eishyshok, collecting thousands of photographs and personal stories from all over the world. The result is this extraordinary book, which weaves these stories into a comprehensive and moving study of shtetl life and culture. Yaffa Eliach has written a landmark history that triumphantly brings to life a people and a world the Nazis sought to destroy. |
 |
The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition Michael Good When The Search for Major Plagge was published last spring, the world finally learned about a unique hero-and about one American doctor's extraordinary journey to tell Karl Plagge's story.Part detective story, part personal quest, Michael Good's book is the story of the German commander of a Lithuanian work camp who saved hundreds of Jewish lives in the Vilna ghetto -including the life of Good's mother, Pearl. Who was this enigmatic officer Pearl Good had spoken of so often?After five years of research-interviewing survivors, assembling a team that could work to open German files untouched for fifty years, following every lead he could, Good was able to uncover the amazing tale of one man's remarkable courage. And in April 2005 Karl Plagge joined Oskar Schindler and 380 other Germans as a Righteous among Nations,honored by the State of Israel for protecting and saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.This expanded edition features new photographs and a new epilogue on the impact of the discovery of Karl Plagge-especially the story of 83-year-old Alfons von Deschwanden, who, after fifty years of silence, came forward as a veteran of Plagge's unit. His testimony is now part of this growing witness to truth. |
 |
A Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages: A Concise Exposition of the History of Sanskrit, Old Iranian ... Old Armenian, Greek, Latin, ... Lithuanian and Old Church Slavonic, Volume 1 Karl Brugmann, William Henry Denham Rouse, Robert Seymour Conway This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. |
 |
Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder Kazimierz Sakowicz About sixty thousand Jews from Wilno (Vilnius, Jewish Vilna) and surrounding townships in present-day Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in huge pits on the outskirts of Ponary. Over a period of several years, Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in the village of Ponary, was an eyewitness to the murder of these Jews as well as to the murders of thousands of non-Jews on an almost daily basis. He chronicled these events in a diary that he kept at great personal risk.Written as a simple account of what Sakowicz witnessed, the diary is devoid of personal involvement or identification with the victims. It is thus a unique document: testimony from a bystander, an objective” observer without an emotional or a political agenda, to the extermination of the Jews of the city known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”Sakowicz did not survive the war, but much of his diary did. Painstakingly pieced together by Rahel Margolis from scraps of paper hidden in various locations, the diary was published in Polish in 1999. It is here published in English for the first time, extensively annotated by Yitzhak Arad to guide readers through the events at Ponary. |