A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

by Mark Kurlansky
A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

by Mark Kurlansky

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

A POWERFUL, DEEPLY MOVING NARRATIVE OF HOPE REBORN
IN THE SHADOW OF DESPAIR

Fifty years after it was bombed to rubble, Berlin is once again a city in which Jews gather for the Passover seder. Paris and Antwerp have recently emerged as important new centers of Jewish culture. Small but proud Jewish communities are revitalizing the ancient centers of Budapest, Prague, and Amsterdam. These brave, determined Jewish men and women have chosen to settle–or remain–in Europe after the devastation of the Holocaust, but they have paid a price. Among the unexpected dangers, they have had to cope with an alarming resurgence of Nazism in Europe, the spread of Arab terrorism, and the impact of the Jewish state on European life.

Delving into the intimate stories of European Jews from all walks of life, Kurlansky weaves together a vivid tapestry of individuals sustaining their traditions, and flourishing, in the shadow of history. An inspiring story of a tenacious people who have rebuilt their lives in the face of incomprehensible horror, A Chosen Few is a testament to cultural survival and a celebration of the deep bonds that endure between Jews and European civilization.

“Consistently absorbing . . . A Chosen Few investigates the relatively uncharted territory of an encouraging phenomenon.”
–Los Angeles Times

“I can think of no book that portrays with such intelligence, historical understanding, and journalistic flair what life has been like for Jews determined to build lives in Europe.”
–SUSAN MIRON
Forward

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780345448149
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/26/2002
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 1,126,432
Product dimensions: 5.54(w) x 8.23(h) x 0.99(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Mark Kurlansky is the author of Salt; The Basque History of the World; the New York Times bestseller Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World; A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Carribean Destiny; and a collection of stories, The White Man in the Tree. He is a regular contributor to the Partisan Review. He has also written for the International Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, NY

Date of Birth:

December 7, 1948

Place of Birth:

Hartford, CT

Education:

Butler University, B.A. in Theater, 1970

Read an Excerpt

Anti-Semitism has proven to be one of the most enduring concepts in European civilization. In a 1927 book called The Wandering Jew, about the struggles of poor eastern European Jews, Viennese Jewish novelist Joseph Roth concluded that anti-Semitism would vanish from the world, ended by the Soviet Union. He wrote of anti-Semitism, "In the new Russia, it remains a disgrace. What will ultimately kill it off is public shame." He noted virulent outbursts in Russia but dismissed them as the death struggles of dinosaurs resisting the inevitable future.

Roth even speculated that "If this process continues, the age of
Zionism will have passed, along with the age of anti-Semitism—
and perhaps even that of Judaism itself."

Today the Soviet Union has been gone for a decade but anti-Semitism is still here. So for that matter, is Judaism. "The Jewish question"—I have never been certain what the question is—that
Roth predicted would be put to rest with Russian leadership, has endured.

The lesson to be learned from Roth, aside from a warning to writers not to publish predictions in books, is that both Judaism and anti-Semitism have deep and permanent roots in Europe.
Though Judaism is a less European idea than anti-Semitism, for many Jews, Jewish culture is European—or was.

Because of the Holocaust, Europe is no longer the most Jewish continent. It may have remained the most anti-Semitic, though
Africa and Asia, with their Muslim populations are certainly vying for the title. It is difficult to be certain because anti-Semitism is more difficult to quantify than Judaism. As the nations of the former
Soviet bloc struggle for acceptance in the West—admission into Western clubs such as NATO and the European Union—
Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress have urged that progress towards democracy in these nations be measured by the way they are treating their Jews. This is not as skewed a perspective as it at first sounds. Anti-Semitism, whether in Hungary,
Germany, or France, has usually been tied to undemocratic movements. The growth of anti-Semitism in France, from the
Dreyfus case to World War II collaboration, was tied to monarchists,
fascists, and other groups that did not support republicanism.
The Soviet Union was in principle opposed to anti-Semitism,
and even outlawed its outward manifestations. But as that nation grew increasingly repressive, it also became increasingly anti-Semitic.
The "anti-zionist campaign" in Poland in the late 1960s was the precursor to general repression.

But a more subtle anti-Semitism is allowed to breathe and grow even in the setting of democracy. Now in the early twenty-first century when so much urgency is given to fighting international terrorism, it is useful to remember that in the late twentieth century
Jews feared Arab gunmen and bombs in Paris, Antwerp,
Munich—much of western Europe. No European Jew went to a
Jewish restaurant or a synagogue without calculating the risk of attack. These attacks against social organizations, restaurants,
schools and synagogues were met with official statements of outrage and very little else. Almost no effort was made to capture or punish the perpetrators, even when Israeli intelligence offered information that could lead to their capture. Today when wondering how international Arab terrorism could have become so brazen,
we should note that twenty years ago they were allowed to kill
Jews in western Europe with impunity.

In the decade that has passed since I researched A Chosen Few,
the standing in Europe of both Judaism and anti-Semitism has barely changed. This is not surprising, but what is surprising is that none of the countries about which I wrote in this book has moved one step further away from World War II. Europe, sixty years after the Holocaust, has achieved no more closure than had
Europe fifty years after. Dariusz Stola, a historian of the twentieth century at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said in a lecture delivered in June 2001 at the University of Warsaw, "The Holocaust is not a problem of the past. It is a problem of the present. I can hardly find a European country without a World War II problem from Germany, French collaboration, Swiss banks, the role of the
Vatican. If you do not have problems with World War II, you are not European."

The World War II problem, the Jewish question—these are distinctly
European debates. It would have been logical to imagine that these issues had to be resolved, before the Jews would return.
But in fact they returned before there was any resolution and now children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of survivors,
live their lives half citizen and half metaphor.

The Jews have an irrefutable claim on what all Europeans want—standing as World War II victims. Everyone was either—
in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg—a victim, a bystander, or a perpetrator. The worst fate has become the best status. Just as Jews have always been envied and resented for whatever they had, they are envied today for their victim status.
Europeans need to show that they too, not just Jews, were the victims of World War II. The French and Dutch accomplish this with some difficulty. The Poles stubbornly fight for their victim status. Even the Germans hope that somehow Dresden gives them a chance for victim status.

The Jews of Dresden in the former East Germany have recently found their real life in Germany and their metaphorical one at cross purposes. Across the wide and curving Elbe, in the Baroque historic city center, where blackened sandstone fairies cavort from ancient rooftops, workers waddle by, clearing debris with wheel-barrows.
The city is finally digging out from the famous Febru-ary
13, 1945, British RAF bombing run followed the next morning with an attack by the U.S. Army Air Force. Initially, the German police claimed 18,000 dead. But in subsequent years the count has wavered between 30,000 and 130,000.

Germany fell, and with little chance for recrimination against the rest of the world, Germans have, for a half century, denounced the bombing of Dresden as cruel and unnecessary.

Before it was bombed into a ruin, Dresden, the capital of Saxony,
had been one of the prized centers of Germany. The old walled medieval town reached its golden age in the eighteenth century.
A Protestant church with a huge dome defining the city skyline,
the Frauenkirche, became the symbol of Dresden—like an Eiffel
Tower or an Empire State building. Bach gave the Frauenkirche's first organ concert.

But for forty-five years after the 1945 bombing, the view across the Elbe was of the piles of stone, staircases overgrown with bushes, wall fragments silhouetted against the sky, the skeleton of one burned-out dome sticking out above overgrown rubble piles amid a huge vacant lot that had been cleared with bulldozers.

In 1949, when the Cold War began with Germany splitting into
West and East, East Germany, the German Democratic Republic,
found a perfect convergence of political rhetoric and economic reality. They did not have the money to completely rebuild their cities, but in leaving central Berlin with bullet holes and crumbling walls and Dresden with its charred remains, they were creating monuments to the horror the fascists had brought on the
German people. Fascists were the perpetrators and Germans were the victims.

Reading Group Guide

1. The book both opens and closes with Passover. What is the significance of this holiday to this story?

2. What has been the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations of European Jews? How does this differ from the impact on subsequent generations of American Jews?

3. Was it reasonable for Jews to return after the war to the countries where they had been betrayed?

4. After the fall of Communism, very few Jews were left in Eastern
Europe who had any experience with the practice of the religion.
What does it mean to rebuild a Jewish community with secular Jews?

5. Explain the difference in motivation between those Jews who returned to East Germany and those who returned to West
Germany after the war.

6. Should the Zionists who returned to postwar Europe have gone to Israel instead?

7. Would it have been easier to rebuild a religious community or an assimilated community in postwar Europe?

8. Has European Jewry since 1945 undergone a resurrection, as implied in the subtitle of this book, or is it something less than that?

9. What impact has the state of Israel had on European Jews?

10. What does it mean for American Jews that these communities in Europe still exist?

11. Throughout European history, France was always thought of as a haven for Jews, until the twentieth century. As the country with the largest Jewish population in Europe, will it be a haven or a dangerous place for Jews going forward into the twenty-first century?

12. Why is the survival of European Jewry so crucial to the Jewish people throughout the rest of the world?

13. In countries with some of the worst records of treatment of
Jews, it has become fashionable to embrace everything Jewish.
Is this philo-Semitism another form of anti-Semitism, and is it dangerous?

14. Three million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and most of those who returned were subsequently driven out. In the current political climate of Poland, is there a future for
Jews, and are there enough to build a real community?

15. Why do survivors in Holland appear to be in more pain than in most other countries? Is it because Holland never came to terms with its war history? Is it that as a society, Holland is more open to discussing psychological problems than other countries in Europe?

16. What has the impact of terrorism been on Jewish communities in Europe?

17. Russian Jews have been immigrating to Western Europe, especially
Germany, most of them with very little knowledge of Judaism.
What will be their impact?

18. What has been the role of the Hasidic movement in modern
European Judaism?

19. Following the Six-Day War, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe,
and even deGaulle’s France shifted their policies toward Israel.
What was the impact on European Jewry?

20. Are the communities described in this book merely vestigial or is there a future for Jewry in Europe?

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