The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33

doi:10.11647/obp.0341

The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33 - cover image

DOI

https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0341

License

http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright

Yankev Leshchinsky

Published On

2023-03-08

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80064-990-3

Hardback978-1-80064-991-0

PDF978-1-80064-992-7

HTML978-1-80064-996-5

XML978-1-80064-995-8

EPUB978-1-80064-993-4

AZW3978-1-80064-994-1

Language

English
Yiddish

Print Length

178 pages (xxii+156)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 13 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.51" x 9.21")

Hardback156 x 16 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.63" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback352g (12.42oz)

Hardback517g (18.24oz)

Media

Illustrations8

Tables7

OCLC Number

1372295823

LCCN

2021385334

BIC

HBLW
HBTZ
JFSR1

BISAC

HIS022000
SOC007000
HIS010010
HIS037070

LCC

DS134.55

Keywords

Yankev Leshchinsky
socioeconomics
politics
Jews
Eastern Europe
Ukraine
sociology
interwar period
Poland
nationalism
pogroms
history
Holocaust

Economics, Politics and Sociology

The Last Years of Polish Jewry

Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33

Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
Robert Brym (translator)
Eli Jany (translator)
Robert Brym (editor)

This book is part of a 2-volume set. The other volume in the set is:

The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 2: On the Eve of Destruction: Essays, 1935-37

Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876–1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English.

The Last Years of Polish Jewry helps to rectify this situation by translating some of Leshchinsky’s key essays. A thoughtful Introduction by Robert Brym provides the context of the author’s life and work.

The essays in this volume, based on years of research and first-hand observation, focus on the period 1927–33. The rise of militant Polish nationalism and the ensuing anti-Jewish boycotts and pogroms; the increasing exclusion of Jews from government employment and the universities; the destitution, hunger, suicide, and efforts to emigrate that characterized Jewish life; the psychological toll taken by mass uncertainty and hopelessness—all this falls within the author’s ambit. There is no work in English that comes close to the range and depth of Leshchinsky’s essays on the last years of the three million Polish Jews who were to perish at the hand of the Nazi regime.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students of Eastern European history and society, especially those with an interest in Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities on the brink of the Holocaust.

Endorsements

Yankev Leshchinsky wanted to believe that Jewish life could thrive in modern Eastern Europe. But unable to cease asking trenchant sociological questions, unable to look away, he did more than any other scholar of his age to anatomize the foreclosure of Jewish prospects by the crisis of capitalism, economic nationalism, and rising antisemitism. No student of Jewish life in Poland and Eastern Europe as a whole can proceed without this indispensable work, and generations of students and scholars will be in Robert Brym’s debt.

Kenneth B. Moss

Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History and the College, University of Chicago

Reviews

[Leshchinsky's] books and articles remain until today among the most important sources on Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Now we can read one of his books in English in the volume, The Last Years of Polish Jewry: At the Edge of the Abyss, 1927-33, edited by Professor Robert Brym....The second volume of this project will hopefully soon be published.

Mikhail Krutikov, Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and associate, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

"He Foresaw the Downfall of Polish Jewry 10 Years before the Holocaust". Forverts (Forward), 2023.

Full Review