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After
six years of
meticulous research, a skill further honed since his first book,
History of the Jewish
Community of Schneidemühl: 1641 to the
Holocaust
(Avotaynu, 2006), Peter Simonstein Cullman in this 480-page
opus has gone beyond the standard set in the genre of contemporary
yizkor books (Holocaust memorial books). He has created a monograph
that encapsulates more than the 200-year history of the Jewish
community of Schönlanke (today Trzcianka, Poland).
The
book’s
narrative commences with an illustration of Jewish existence in German
lands in the age of Charlemagne, the birth of the Polish nation and the
impact of geopolitical upheavals on Jewish life, while extraordinary
heights of Jewish culture were reached in 16th century Poland. The
reader is led to witness the evolution of the community’s
religious life under Prussia’s pedantic rule in tandem with
the Jewish Enlightenment. A portrait of Jews in war and peace, an
introduction to the community’s social fibre and its
venerable rabbis is followed by an analysis of a history-making
religious conversion of one of this community’s members.
Extensive
annotated community
registers of the early 1800s may allow
for genealogical research by linking the ancestries of early families
to the near present.
The
book concludes with the chapter Lo tishkach (‘Do not
forget’).
This
exceptionally detailed
biographical
documentation of the lives and fates of the community’s
hundreds of victims and survivors of the Holocaust serves as a memoir
of a once flourishing Jewish community that ceased to exist in 1940.
7" x 10" 480 pp. hardcover $46.00
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