A nostalgic trip into the history of the Jews of Iraq

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Steven E. Aschheim

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern "enlightened" Jewry and its "half-Asian" counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

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Hugh Poulton

From the ruins of the former Yugoslavia emerged a new sovereign state, the republic of Macedonia, an ancient country of diverse peoples whose history and identity have long been subjects of heated dispute. In this ambitious survey Hugh Poulton traces the history of the peoples of Macedonia - Slavs, Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Vlachs, Jews and Roma (Gypsies) - from antiquity to the present. The impact of nationalism in the Balkans and the disintegration of the Ottoman empire are examined in relation to Macedonia with special reference to the bloody territorial struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The partitioning of Macedonia between Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania and the inter-war experience are discussed, as are the Second World War and the Greek civil war. . Later chapters examine how Tito fostered a separate Macedonian consciousness, how the Macedonians fared in relation to the other Yugoslav ethnic groups, and the situation of Macedonians in neighbouring states. The book concludes with Macedonia's emergence as an independent state in the face of Greek opposition, and a discussion of its chance of avoiding entanglement in the ongoing Balkan war.

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David A. Chapin and Ben Weinstock

"The Road from Letichev presents the history of the area through the eyes of individuals who lived there. The Letichev District (Podolia) of Ukraine was a microcosm of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. It was the home of the Baal Shem Tov and the cradle of the Chasidic movement. This book is, in part, dedicated to the 300th anniversary of his birth. The books purpose is to document what was destroyed in the Holocaust. Although the Soviet experience in the Holocaust is relatively rare in modern literature, no understanding of the Holocaust is truly complete without an understanding of what the Nazis took away from the world. Through the testimonials from survivors of the Holocaust we learn new information about the horrors of the Nazi occupation on Soviet soil. Richly illustrated, more than 8300 individuals are indexed, including more than 600 unique Jewish surnames from Letichev District. The first of its kind, it provides a complete encyclopedia of the rabbis who traveled The Road from Letichev, plus a detailed description of synagogues (most of which are now destroyed). Interwoven into the fabric of Jewish life are songs, food, folklore, health, education and crime. The best description of a Jewish agricultural colony to date is detailed. On a tragic note, new information is provided on the 1648 Khmelnitsky massacres, as well as the pogroms of 1882, 1903-7, and 1919-21"--Back cover.

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Philip Gourevitch

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Philip Gourevitch his title. With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa. Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.