Ghosts of Home The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory [Paperback]

In modern-day Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the Vienna of the East under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War IIyet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lorebut also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Hirsch and Spitzer present the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language and offer a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.

Marianne Hirschis William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Co-Director of the Institute of Research on Women and Gender, at Columbia University. She is the author ofFamily Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, among other books.Leo Spitzeris Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College, and the author of many books, most recentlyHotel Bolivia: A Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism.

List of Illustrations
Preface

Part One
We would not have come without you, 1998
1 / Where are you from?
2 / Vienna of the East
3 / Strolling the Herrengasse
4 / The Idea of Czernowitz
5 / Are we really in the Soviet Union?
6 / The Crossroads

Part Two
The Darker Side, 2000
7 / Maps to Nowhere
8 / The Spot on the Lapel
9 / There was never a camp here!
10 / This was once my home

Part Three
Ghosts of Home, 2006
11 / The Persistence of Czernowitz
12 / The Tile Stove

Epilogue, 20ls