On the Eve
The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the brink of annihilation. In this provocative book, Bernard Wasserstein presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught.
In the 1930s, as Europe spiraled toward the Second World War, the continent’s Jews faced an existential crisis. The harsh realities of the age—anti-Semitic persecution, economic discrimination, and an ominous climate of violence—devastated Jewish communities and shattered the lives of individuals.
The Jewish crisis was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Demographic collapse, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution were all taking their toll. The problem was not just Nazism: In the summer of 1939 more Jews were behind barbed wire outside the Third Reich than within it, and not only in police states but even in the liberal democracies of the West. The greater part of Europe was being transformed into a giant concentration
camp for Jews. Unlike most previous accounts, On the Eve focuses not on the anti-Semites but on the Jews. Wasserstein refutes the common misconception that they were unaware of the gathering forces of their enemies. He demonstrates that there was a growing and widespread recognition among Jews that they stood on the edge of an abyss.
On the Eve recaptures the agonizing sorrows and the effervescent cultural glories of this last phase in the history of the European Jews. It explores their hopes, anxieties, and ambitions, their family ties, social relations, and intellectual creativity—everything that made life meaningful and bearable for them.
Wasserstein introduces a diverse array of characters: holy men and hucksters, beggars and bankers, politicians and poets, housewives and harlots, and, in an especially poignant chapter, children without a future. The geographical range also is vast: from Vilna (the “Jerusalem of the North”) to Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris, from the Judeo-Espagnol-speaking stevedores of Salonica to the Yiddish-language collective farms of Soviet Ukraine and Crimea.
Wasserstein’s aim is to “breathe life into dry bones.” Based on comprehensive research, rendered with compassion and empathy, and brought alive by telling anecdotes and dry wit, On the Eve offers a vivid and enlightening picture of the European Jews in their final hour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ten million Jews lived in Europe in the late 1930s, and University of Chicago history professor Wasserstein (Barbarism and Civilization) seeks to restore both the successes and conundrums of the lives of their multifaceted communities that flourished in the face of the fact that whether they remained openly Jewish or tried to assimilate, they were rejected by most other Europeans. Still, Europe's Jews felt a deep sense of rootedness in cities like Amsterdam, Vilna, Minsk, and Salonica, and were often the most literate section of the population. The Jewish press, with at least 854 different publications, was a vibrant, multilingual reflection of the lives of its readers. In the performing arts hundreds of Jewish playwrights, actors, critics, and directors transformed the European stage, and audiences were predominantly Jewish, too. Jewish politics were highly factionalized, raucous, and uncompromising between the wars; Jewish women also played a disproportionate role in the feminist movements all over the continent. Wasserstein even acknowledges the sporting lives of Europe's Jews particularly at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where 13 Jews won medals (though their triumph was tinged with irony in a Nazi-ruled Germany). A substantive, perceptive, and highly valuable kaddish for lost lives and lost worlds. 16 pages of b&w photos; maps.
