In this powerful and unusual memoir, Lucy S. Dawidowicz tells of her life during the tragic years of 1937-1948, bearing witness to the ruthless destruction of European Yiddish culture during the Second World War. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly In this deeply moving personal reminiscence, eminent historian Dawidowicz ( The War Against the Jews ) recounts the year she spent in Vilna, Poland, shortly before barbaric German troops swept in and murdered nearly all of that city's 60,000 Jews. Vilna no longer exists--Vilnius, the present-day capital of Soviet Lithuania, contains hardly a trace of the former city, which makes this poignant memoir all the more valuable. In 1938, Dawidowicz, a disillusioned 23-year-old radical and ex-communist of Polish-Jewish ancestry, embarked from New York for YIVO, Vilna's famed Yiddish Scientific Institute, to study Jewish history. Beggars filled the streets as the Poles' vicious anti-Semitic policies and actions accelerated pauperization of the Jews. Back in New York, working for YIVO's American branch, the author watched with rage and anguish as Europe's Jews were massacred and most of her Vilna friends murdered. She returned to occupied Germany in 1946, to work with Holocaust survivors in displaced-person camps. Her piercingly eloquent narrative gives us a sharp first-hand impression of a world in ruins and of the irreparable losses suffered by European Jewry. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal A leading historian of the Holocaust, Dawidowicz transports the reader from 1938, when she studied in Vilna, Poland, through 1946, when she returned to Europe to assist Jewish survivors. This is a powerful and absorbing memoir; her description of Vilna, an ancient center of Jewish culture and tradition, is so clear and authentic that one almost realizes what it was like to have been an East European Jew on the eve of the Holocaust. The most poignant section is that in which Dawidowicz--safely back in the United States--recounts her profound sorrow and outrage as she gradually learns the extent of the horrors simultaneously occurring in Germany and Poland. For most academic and public libraries. - Mark R. Yerburgh, Trinity Coll. Lib., Burlington, Vt. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.