Book Review: Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland. By Glenn Dynner. Oxford University Press, 2014. Despite various expulsions, evictions and repressive tax measures meant to force them out of business, Jewish-run taverns were a ubiquitous presence in Poland from roughly the 17th to the late 19th centuries. Polish historians have often…
Book Review: Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey, by Mikhal Dekel. Hardcover, 418 pages. Published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. In September 1939, as Nazi militias approached their town of Ostrow Mazowiecka in northeastern Poland, the author’s paternal grandparents, like many others, were faced with a momentous decision: stay or flee eastwards into Russian-occupied…
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,…
Book Review: The Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia (McGill-Queen’s) This 522-page hardcover volume combines two books in one. First, there is Valerie Schatzker’s non-fiction scholarly history from 1853 to 1945 of the almost-forgotten East Galician Jews who became early “wildcatters” and oil barons in one of the world’s first petroleum industries, concentrated in the region…
Herman Kempinski was evidently a first cousin once removed to my great-great-grandfather, Rafael Glicenstein, and both came from the town of Konin, Poland. Herman, born about 1854, was one of the many thousands of Russian-Polish Jews to emigrate to the United States in the late 1800s: he left Konin at age 17 in 1872. He…
August 2018 We arrived in Opatow in early evening and I took my bags upstairs to my hotel room, which directly overlooked the city gate. The next day as we looked around, I thought of the many Torontonians whose parents and grandparents had left the town before the war, and the many more Jews from “Apt” (at least 7,000) who perished…
August 2018 The moment I stepped out of the car, I realized that this was the first time a member of my family had been back in our ancestral town in more than 130 years. I was in Konin, in the Lodz district of Poland, the town where my paternal ancestors had lived for generations…
Four years ago, a Pennsylvanian antiques collector purchased a trove of old scrapbooks and photo albums at an estate sale in the town of Red Lion, Pa. The cache, which included hundreds of photographs including some taken in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943, cost only $10. Discovering that the material was related to…
From Canadian Jewish News, 2008 Howard Nightingale, a Toronto lawyer, has been the driving force behind the restoration of an old abandoned Jewish cemetery in Siedleczka, Poland, that will be officially rededicated in a ceremony set for August 17th [2008]. Nightingale and representatives of numerous other Toronto Jewish families plan to be in attendance,…
Ottawa history professor Jan Grabowski used the recently accessible records of thousands of wartime trials of Nazi collaborators while researching his book, “Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland,” which earned him the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. Some 40,000 to 50,000 collaborator trials occurred in Poland after…
