A guide to missing pieces of European Jewish history, each building lovingly described and painted to bring readers inside.
A guide to sacred places that have disappeared.
Among the many scars left by the Holocaust remain the gaping grounds and bulldozed squares where houses of Jewish worship once stood. More than sites of faith, these buildings were community centers, nodes for family and social life. And in their shape and size, the European synagogues were structures unique to a time and place. They represent that blend of enlightenment reason with observant devotion that characterized Jewish life in towns and cities from Livorno to Aachen, from Dresden to Kaliningrad, from Tartu to Vienna. As Ismar Schorsch writes in a foreword to this collection of paintings of lost synagogues, “The synagogue emerged as an utterly new and revolutionary religious institution that privileged intimate verbal prayer over the operation of a vast sacrificial cult.” Synagogues were led by rabbis. They held copies of the Torah. They brought together communities of worship. Jewish tradition requires at least 10 men (a minyan) to form a functioning congregation. By traveling to places that no longer exist, the reader goes on a journey of worship, participating in a recreated minyan of the mind. Should readers use this book to travel to these sites—Strongwater’s colorful and folksy paintings recreate 77 lost synagogues—they will find themselves filling in lacunae in the history of Jewish life. There were once roughly 17,000 synagogues in Europe. Only 3,300 stood after World War II, and only 700 of those remain as synagogues. Strongwater writes, “Because the synagogues painted for this book necessarily represent only those important enough to have been documented in their time, they must do double duty, reminding us of the thousands more that were obliterated without leaving any historical record.” These thousands of buildings, magnificent in their time, cannot be rebuilt. But they can be reinhabited by the creative readers of this haunting travelogue through time.
A guide to missing pieces of European Jewish history, each building lovingly described and painted to bring readers inside.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780827615694
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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