By
– March 30, 2012
This book, the winner of the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for European Studies and a finalist for the Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought, takes the reader into the lives of the founding generation of Polish intellectual Communists. Presenting the lives of a group of Jewish writers and poets, the author endeavors to immerse the reader in the background, ideologies, and polemics in order to understand Marxism as it was experienced by the generation of East European Jews in the first part of the 20th century. These Marxists were disputing the future well before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet occupation in Poland. Spanning the years from the early 1920’s to the end of the 1960’s and using archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore — an assistant professor of history at Indiana University — delves into the fate of these intellectuals. This is a story about making choices in history, and how lives took different twists and turns, sometimes ending in imprisonment and death. Beautifully written and well researched, this is a scholarly work recommended for all academic libraries. Index and notes.
Sonia Silva obtained a MLIS from the University of Montreal. She is a children’s librarian at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal and the Liaison Librarian for Jewish Studies at McGill University.
