Jet Lag

Visiting Europe’s most unhappy places, Ann Birstein offers a moving perspective on a tragic people trapped by history.


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“European Discovery Tour” was the title on the travel brochure.  But as Ann Birstein knew, the journey that she signed up for included a discovery of the most unhappy places on the continent.  Her little tour group, most all of them Jewish, was shepherded not only to some of Eastern Europe’s grandest locales but also to its most terrible, including the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, and other grim reminders of the Holocaust and the lost Jews of Europe.  Along the way in what became a search for her own soul, Ms. Birstein offers a moving perspective on a tragic people trapped by history.


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Ann Birstein is the author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, which include the novels American Children and Summer Situations; an autobiography, What I Saw at the Fair; and a biography of her father, The Rabbi on Forty-Seventh Street.  Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, and many other publications.  Her grants and honors include a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.  She has taught and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. At Barnard College, where she was a professor for many years, she founded and directed Writers on Writing.