by Gaye Applebaum From the Canadian Jewish News, 1983 As the SS Hamilton Scandinavian docked at Quebec City on Aug. 21, 1921, a tremor of excitement surged through the rain-drenched crowd. On the ship’s deck huddled 108 frightened but excited Ukrainian Jewish children – all of them rescued war orphans from the devastated Polish Ukraine.…
From Avotaynu, 2020 Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and “Portuguese” Communities, by Alexander Beider. Like a Napoleon of names, Alexander Beider has been sweeping methodically across the Jewish diaspora seeking to apply a rigid scientific methodology to the naturally-occurring phenomenon of Jewish surnames. Beider has devoted more than three decades…
Book review: Sledgehammer: How Breaking With The Past Brought Peace To The Middle East, by David Friedman, former US Ambassador to Israel. HarperCollins, 2022. In Sledgehammer, lawyer-turned-ambassador David Friedman offers some excellent background to the important story of the Abraham Accords, which stand as the most significant development in Middle East peace since Israel’s treaties…
Shanghai’s Baghdadi Jews: A Collection of Biographical Reflections, by Maisie J. Meyer, author and editor. Large format, 480 pages, softcover. Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong, 2015. Shanghai’s community of Ashkenazic Jews, who arrived from Poland and elsewhere in Europe in the early 20th century and in advance of the Holocaust, is already fairly well-known. What is…
Review: The Most Tenacious of Minorities: The Jews of Italy, by Sara Reguer. Hardcover, 190 pages. Boston: published by Academic Studies Press, 2013. www. academicstudiespress.com The Jews have been booted out of so many places during their history, it seems only natural that they should have a long and colourful past in the Italian “boot.”…
The Neu-Raussnitz Tax Book by Dr. Heinrich Flesch, translated, adapted and with an introduction by Patrick Gordis & Henry Wellisch Some 90 years ago, a Moravian rabbi and historian, Dr. Heinrich Flesch (1875-1942), annotated a list of Jews from Neu-Raussnitz, Moravia, who paid taxes in 1808, then used the annotated list as a basis for a…
Becoming Hapsburg: The Jews of Austrian Bukovina, 1774-1918, by David Rechter. Hardcover, 214 pages. Published by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Portland, Oregon, 2013. www.littman.co.uk Author David Rechter, a research fellow in Modern Jewish History at Oxford, has made a full-length and comprehensively researched study of the Jews of Austrian Bukovina, beginning with the…
Our Litvak Inheritance, Volumes One and Two of Our Litvak and South African Jewish Inheritance, compiled by David Solly Sandler. Three large-format paperback volumes with b&w illustrations , published 2016. Like most South African Jews, Sandler’s ancestors emigrated to South Africa from Lithuania between 1880 and 1920. A thorough historical researcher but not what…
Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, by Glenn Kurtz. Trade paperback, 420 pages. Published 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. www.fsgbooks.com In the summer of 1938, the author’s American grandparents, David and Liza Kurtz, took a six-week European vacation that included a brief visit to a Polish town,…
From Avotaynu, 2018 Peddlers All: Stories of the First Ashkenazi Jewish Settlers in Barbados, edited by Simon Kreindler. Trade paperback, softcover, 450 pages. US $35. Published privately in 2017 by the author; iamsimonkreindler @gmail.com The British colonized the Caribbean island of Barbados in 1627, and the first Jewish settlers arrived the following year. In 1654,…
