Between Dignity and Despair

Between Dignity and Despair PDF Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195313585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Between Dignity and Despair

Between Dignity and Despair PDF Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195313585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Between Dignity and Despair

Between Dignity and Despair PDF Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199839050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s Jewish Refugees

Hitler’s Jewish Refugees PDF Author: Marion Kaplan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300249500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.

The Making of the Jewish Middle Class

The Making of the Jewish Middle Class PDF Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199772134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A social history of Jewish women in Imperial Germany, this study synthesizes German, women's, and Jewish history. The book explores the private--familial and religious--lives of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and the public roles of Jewish women in the university, paid employment and social service. It analyzes the changing roles of Jewish women as members of an economically mobile, but socially spurned minority. The author emphasizes the crucial role women played in creating the Jewish middle class, as well as their dual role within the Jewish family and community as powerful agents of class formation and acculturation and determined upholders of tradition.

A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany

A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany PDF Author: Lily E. Hirsch
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472034979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Examines the complicated history of a Jewish cultural organization supported by Nazi Germany

Marie Syrkin

Marie Syrkin PDF Author: Carole S. Kessner
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654513
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
Marie Syrkin's life spanned ninety years of the twentieth century, 1899-1989. As a polemical journalist, socialist Zionist, poet, educator, literary critic, translator, and idiosyncratic feminist, she was eyewitness to and reporter on most of the major events in America, Israel, and Europe. Beautiful as well as brilliant, she had a rich personal life as lover, wife, mother, and friend. During her lifetime Syrkin's name was widely recognized in the world of Jewish life and letters. Yet, inevitably, since her death, recognition of her name is no longer quite so immediate. Carole S. Kessner's intention is to restore for a new generation the singular legacy of Syrkin's life. Syrkin was born in Switzerland, the only child of the theoretician of socialist Zionism Nachman Syrkin and Bassya Osnos Syrkin, a feminist socialist Zionist. Following short stints in several European countries, the family immigrated to the United States in 1909. By the age of ten Marie was fluent in five languages. Educated in American public schools and at Cornell University, by the time she was twenty-three she had published translations as well as her own poetry. After her first trip to Palestine in 1933, Syrkin joined the staff of the Jewish Frontier. This began her lifelong contribution to Zionism, Jewish life, and responsible journalism. In 1947 she published her most celebrated work, Blessed Is the Match. In 1950 she became a professor of English literature at Brandeis University and later published a biography of her father and the authorized biography of her longtime close friend Golda Meir. Syrkin married three times: the first, to Maurice Samuel, annulled by her father's intervention; the second, to the biochemist Aaron Bodansky, the father of her son David; the third, to the poet Charles Reznikoff, lasted on and off for more than forty years. In the course of her life, Marie had many influential friends, such as Hayim Greenberg, Ben Gurion, and Irving Howe, and she served as inspiration to many younger intellectuals, including Martin Peretz, Michael Walzer, and Leon Wieseltier. As poet and journalist, Zionist activist and public intellectual, Syrkin's work and actions illuminate a wide range of twentieth-century literary, cultural, and political concerns. Her passions demonstrate, as Irving Howe said, "a life of commitment to values beyond the self."

People in Auschwitz

People in Auschwitz PDF Author: Hermann Langbein
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
Hermann Langbein was allowed to know and see extraordinary things forbidden to other Auschwitz inmates. Interned at Auschwitz in 1942 and classified as a non-Jewish political prisoner, he was assigned as clerk to the chief SS physician of the extermination camp complex, which gave him access to documents, conversations, and actions that would have remained unknown to history were it not for his witness and his subsequent research. Also a member of the Auschwitz resistance, Langbein sometimes found himself in a position to influence events, though at his peril. People in Auschwitz is very different from other works on the most infamous of Nazi annihilation centers. Langbein's account is a scrupulously scholarly achievement intertwining his own experiences with quotations from other inmates, SS guards and administrators, civilian industry and military personnel, and official documents. Whether his recounting deals with captors or inmates, Langbein analyzes the events and their context objectively, in an unemotional style, rendering a narrative that is unique in the history of the Holocaust. This monumental book helps us comprehend what has so tenaciously challenged understanding.

Poles and Jews

Poles and Jews PDF Author: Magdalena Opalski
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9780874516029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Examines Polish and Jewish perceptions of the rapprochement culminating in Polish national insurrection against Czarist Russia in 1863.

Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis

Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis PDF Author: Wolf Gruner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521838754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Abstract

The World of Aufbau

The World of Aufbau PDF Author: Peter Schrag
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299320200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Aufbau—a German-language weekly, published in New York and circulated nationwide—was an essential platform for the generation of refugees from Hitler and the displaced people and concentration camp survivors who arrived in the United States after the war. The publication served to link thousands of readers looking for friends and loved ones in every part of the world. In its pages Aufbau focused on concerns that strongly impacted this community in the aftermath of World War II: anti-Semitism in the United States and in Europe, the ever-changing immigration and naturalization procedures, debates about the designation of Hitler refugees as enemy aliens, questions about punishment for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, the struggle for compensation and restitution, and the fight for a Jewish homeland. The book examines the columns and advertisements that chronicled the social and cultural life of that generation and maintained a detailed account of German-speaking cultures in exile. Peter Schrag is the first to present a definitive account of the influential publication that brought postwar refugees together and into the American mainstream.