Revisiting a Vanished World

...In telling her tale, the author brings to life a world once vibrant and full of self-confidence that now barely survives—the world of secular Yiddishism in which she grew up...

...Instructive as well is Dawidowicz' discussion of her youthful enthusiasm for Communism...

...In the light of the intense nostalgic romanticization of East European Jewish life that has followed its horrible destruction in the Holocaust, her testimony to the reality is invaluable...

...The author's recollections of Vilna make up the heart of the book...

...Ironically, in so lovingly reconstructing the dead world of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, From That Place and Time testifies to the benevolence of the United States...

...Dawidowicz refrains from drawing any explicit historical conclusions from what she lived through...

...Much of Dawidowicz' memoir has to do with her commitment to this Yiddishist ethos...

...Vilna Jewry, like Polish Jewry as a whole, was splintered along religious, class, political, and cultural lines...

...How Dawidowicz helped preserve the victims' cultural legacy is the theme of the book's final section...

...Growing up in New York City as the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, she received no religious instruction but attended Yiddish supplementary schools in addition to public school...

...This memoir, combining an account of involvement in historical events with a parallel story of the personal development of the author from age 23 to age 32, could not have been easy to write...

...While many historians have written about the anti-Semitic campaign waged by the Polish regime even as Hitler was massing his armies to invade and dismember the country, the author's description of actually seeing the situation deteriorate day by day, and her quotations from letters she wrote about it at the time, provide a fascinating perspective...

...And she is too much the historian to rely on recollection alone: Nearly 100 surviving letters she wrote from Vilna to a sister and to aclose friend serve as objective checks on the possible vagaries of memory...

...Its cornerstone was the belief that Yiddish, the folk language of Jewish Eastern Europe, along with the literature it produced and the values it presumably exemplified, could form the basis for an autonomous secular Jewish culture in whatever country the Jews lived...

...So deep was her fascination with the Yiddishist expression of Jewishness that, after a college-age fling with the Communist Party and an abortive attempt at a graduate degree in English literature, she traveled to Vilna, Poland, the heart of living Yiddish culture, to study at the Yiddish Scientific Institute, better known by the acronym yrvo...

...21.95 Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Director of Publications, American Jewish Committee Lucy S. Dawidowicz is an eminent historian whose best-known work, The War Against the Jews, masterfully chronicles how the Nazis planned and carried out the destruction of European Jewry in the 1930s and '40s...

...At War's end, her worst fears were realized: Among the millions of Jews wiped out by the Nazis and their collaborators were virtually all of her Vilna colleagues and acquaintances...

...In 1946, she went to work for the American Joint Distribution Committee to help ease the plight of Jewish survivors in German displaced persons camps...

...Admitting her own early blindness to Zionism, she frankly acknowledges that it has succeeded in establishing a framework for Jewish continuity, whereas all other secular Jewish ideologies, including the Yiddishism she embraced, have been bankrupted by history...

...Once she helped ensure the transfer of these books and papers to YIVO in New York, the author recalls, "I felt that I had laid to rest those ghosts of Vilna that had haunted me since 1938.1 had realized the obsessive fantasies of rescue which had tormentedmeforyears...

...Pious rabbis and ham-eating freethinkers, capitalists and revolutionaries, Zionists and assimilationists, rub elbows along the narrow Vilna streets Dawidowicz describes...

...Jewish attraction to socialism was strong, since the passing away of class distinctions held out the tantalizing though ultimately false promise of an end to anti-Semitism...

...But she ably articulates the factors that led her and so many of her Jewish contemporaries to espouse the party line, and tells how, despite breaking with the Communists in the mid-1930s, she continued to share for years thereafter in the vague sympathy for Leftist causes that characterized most of her Yiddishist associates Dawidowicz also helps us appreciate the extent to which World War II revolutionized Jewish life...

...Though Dawidowicz could not know it when she embarked from New York in August 1938, it would be her fate— or rather her privilege—to come to know the world of Polish Jewry in the last fleeting moments of its long history: A year later, with Hitler about to invade and launch a world war, shereturnedhome...

...In the course of serving as an education officer charged with providing Jewish books for the camps, she found out about large quantities of material from the YTVO library that had been plundered and stored away by the Nazis f or a projected museum on the " Jewish question" that was to have been opened after the final resolution of that "question...

...Since the Holocaust was followed by the rebirth of the State of Israel, we tend to forget this fact...

...Today her political sympathies are quite distant from the Left...

...The Yiddishist alternative—often associated with Left-wing politics—expressed equal hostility to the Jewish (or any other) religion, to Jewish acculturation in Polish or Russian society, and to the Zionist dream...

...Dawidowicz, who in her Communist days did not hesitate to attack the American capitalist system, came to appreciate the basic fairness, good nature and decency inherent in American society—qualities that stood in stark contrast to the prejudices, jealousies and hatreds that turned Europe into a vast slaughterhouse from 193 9 to 1945...

...When the pressures of modernity began to erode the traditional religious basis of Jewish existence in Tsarist Russia and neighboring lands toward the end ofthe 19th century, a variety of new ideological movements vied for the allegiance of the growing number of Jews who were disenchanted with the old ways...

...Her latest book treats that same time period from a different angle...

...Back home in the United States, suffering some guilt for leaving her friends in Vilna to the uncertainties of war, Dawidowicz went to work for YTVO's New York office...

...She points out, for example, that the Zionists constituted just one minority movement within prewar Polish Jewry...

...Founded in 1925, YTVO had become the scholarly and educational focus for Yiddish enthusiasts the world over...

...The time had long passed when one could point to a particular "Jewish" way of life as a standard from which any difference was a deviation...

...The variety and intellectual excitement of this centuries-old Jewish community come across vividly in the book...

...Ihad in fact saved a few remnants of Vilna, even if they were just books, mere pieces of paper, thetatters and shards of acivilization...

...We do not get much detail about her mother and father, yet there is enough to indicate considerable tension between the self-assured, American-born, well-educated daughter and her immigrant, economically insecure parents...

...Nevertheless, the reader will come away from her memoir with fresh insights into the 20th-century Jewish experience...

...Other Jews sought that same goal through the achievement of civic equality without radical social change, hoping to gain citizenship rights as Jewish Poles or Jewish Russians...

...She recounts the story of her ownlife from 1938 to 1947...

...they were far outnumbered by adherents of ideologies that rejected Jewish nationalism...

...Zionists, doubting the long-term viability of Jewishness in predominantly gentile societies, rejected both paths...

...Dawidowicz must have had to struggle to keep the book from turning into an autobiography, but she has succeeded: Except for some hints of youthful romances, the author tells only enough about herself to explain her participation in the movements, institutions and developments of the day...

...Though the chief subject of this book is Europe, it should further be noted that the author implicitly renders a strong positive judgment about the United States...

...Jogging her memory with the hard evidence of contemporary press reports, the author recalls her mounting fury at Germany and the German people as details of the Holocaust accumulated...

...When Dawidowicz arrived, it already had the backing of important political parties and powerful government officials...

...Vivid, too, is her account of anti-Semitism in Poland...

...A similar gap surely characterized many Jewish families of her generation...

...Dawidowicz' Vilna bears no resemblance to the Jewish shtetl of folk stories or to the quaint atmosphere of Fiddler on the Roof...

...They sought a homeland in Palestine, along with the revival of Hebrew language and culture...

...She tells us what it was like, during the War years, to follow the news and find out, bit by bit, about the destruction of the European Jewish civilization she had been a part of...

...For, after all, it celebrates the lot of those Jews—like the author but unlike the doomed residents of Vilna—lucky enough to be this country's citizens...