From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947

by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Book Overview

On August 10, 1938, Lucy S. Dawidowicz set sail from New York to Vilna, Poland, to study at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). For a year, while she studied the Jewish past, she immersed herself in Vilna's present, getting to know the Jewish rich and poor, witnessing Poland's brutal anti-Semitism. Then she was forced to flee Vilna, just a week before German tanks and troops rumbled into Poland and eventually destroyed this citadel of East European...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393026744
• ISBN13: 9780393026740
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 333 Pages
• Weight: 1.66 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An extraordinary personal document

As a counterpoint to her more comprehensive scholarly work on the holocaust, this book provides several personal vignettes of that period in history. Beginning in New York City the account covers making arrangements for the trip, the author's stay in Vilna, a center of Jewish culture in Poland including elements of daily life, cultural, and political events, her narrow escape from Poland as the Nazi invasion progresses, and the finally agonizing wait in New York as news of the insuing catastrophy arrives in bits and pieces. This book provides insight into what it was like to live through that period in history, and may help those close to them to understand people who actually lived through it.