The House at Ujazdowskie 16 Jewish Families in Warsaw after the Holocaust [Hardcover]

In a turn-of-the-century, once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue in the center of Warsaw, 10 Jewish families began reconstructing their lives after the Holocaust. While most surviving Polish Jews were making their homes in new countries, these families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past. Based on interviews with family members, intensive research in archives, and the families' personal papers and correspondence, Karen Auerbach presents an engrossing story of loss and rebirth, political faith and disillusionment, and the persistence of Jewishness.

Glossary of names
Introduction
1 History Brushed Against Us : The Adlers and the Bergmans
2 The Jewish Families of 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue, 1900-1948
3 The Entire Nation Builds Its Capital : Ujazdowskie Avenue and Reconstructed Warsaw
4 Stamp of a Generation : Parents and Children
5 Ostriches in the Wilderness : Children and Parents
6 Finding the Eradicated Traces of the Path : Seeds of Revival
Epilogue: Present and Past
Notes
Bibliography and works cited

This is an interesting and often moving tableau about the efforts of some wounded people to overcome their personal tragedies while redefining their communal loyalties.Amply illustrated with photographs of the families whose lives Auerbach chronicles, the book reverberates with hope and trembles with the tentative efforts of the people to rekindle the flames of their humanity after inestimable loss and trauma.

Karen Auerbach is Kronhill Lecturer in East European Jewish History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. A former journalist, she reported for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Star-Ledger of Newark, and the Forward.

Auerbachs work deserves the highest praise as it is the first attempt at a comprehensive study of Jewish assimilation across generational lines covering the last eighty years of postl£