Binding: Library Binding Dewey Decimal Number: 028.9089924043 EAN: 9780786402038 ISBN: 0786402032 Label: McFarland & Company Manufacturer: McFarland & Company Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 178 Publication Date: 1997-01 Publisher: McFarland & Company Studio: McFarland & Company
Editorial Reviews:
In the years leading up to World War II, libraries played an increasingly significant role in the culture lives of East European Jews. Amid the squalor, books provided many with an opportunity to escape for a while and offered renewed hope and willpower. Maintaining libraries was also an act of resistance, helping the people keep a hold on their humanity and a cultural link with the past. This work details the story of libraries in five of the largest ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe: Ldz and Warsaw in Poland, Kovno and Vilna in Lithuania, and Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: FASCINATING - illuminates a (mostly) unknown phenomenon Comment: There is no way that a description of European Jewish life in the Holocaust can be other than lacerating. That said this small exploration of the resistance of the mind and escape from the physical prison which trapped the Jewish community by their holding tenaciously to the cultural attachment to the written word is remarkable. People, from little children to the elderly, despite the utter horror of their surroundings, made use of books. The image of libraries - still with an overdue system intact - of libraries to which one had to contribute a book to become a borrower - and of the desperate Warsaw fighters hidden behind a case of books are simply a few of the remarkable images that fill this work. If an escape or resistance of the spirit were possible surely this was it; what did those doomed people read to escape from or place a context to their unimaginably horrible experience. It is hard not to take some pleasure in the idea that there were such books - Shavit tells quite precisely what they were and who read them - but sadly notes books were hidden for readers who never returned, the Yiddish literature that has survived in largest quatities was, ironically, that confiscated by the Nazis, and in the end a few of the thumbed, tattered books remained but finally there were no more readers.
