This book ( Penguin Books 1998) by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jonathan Kaufman was written as the walls of Soviet
Communism came tumbling down under Perestroika and Glasnost in 1989. Within this world changing backdrop Kaufman skillfully charts the lives of Jewish families living in countries virtually hidden from the Western world undercommunist rule from the end of the Second World War.Kaufman’s main project in writing this book was to chart the survival of the tiny Jewish communities in Eastern Europe pre- Perestroika, devastated by the Holocaust through the lives of some larger than life characters who would not be out of place in a novel. Such as the courageous Ferenc brothers in Hungary who despite the passive opposition of their father, a
communist party member, and the virulent official anti-Semitism, in the guise of anti-religiosity and anti-Zionism, of the Hungarian government, went on to become Rabbis, and in the oldest brother’s case, Tomas, a leading Jewish dissident, and finally a member of parliament under the new democratic government in the 1990s. No less dramatic or courageous in their own way are the stories of Nechama Estrongo the Greek born canter and survivor of Treblinka, and his German born Jewish wife. Estrongo sings and spiritually administers to the tiny elderly Jewish population of West Berlin and every Friday night crosses the border into East Berlin to the communist controlled radio station to broadcast religious songs to the even smaller more isolated Jewish population of East Germany. There are touching portraits of Barbara Asendrych in Poland, brought up as a Catholic during the war and growing up as an indifferent Catholic under
Communism she discovers from a former Jewish friend of her “mother’s” that she was in fact Jewish and was given to her adoptive mother by her true birth mother when she was new born with the hope she would survive the war. Kaufman then follows her emotional and spiritual journey to trace her family and to rediscover her lost Jewish self. The book comes to no conclusions about her continued search. But perhaps the most dramatic of all is the story of Gregor Gysi, the son of a fiery communist Jewish mother and gentile German father who survives the war as a Communist partisan hiding with his then part Jewish fiancée Gabrielle, who later became his wife. Insisting through most of his life that the Nazis persecuted him because of his communism rather than his Jewishness despite losing almost all of his mother’s side of the family in the Holocaust (his mother escapes to France and becomes ant-communist and pro-Zionist) he remains the most enigmatic and self deluded character of the whole story. Rising to become Minister of Culture under Eric Honneker he was distrusted by intellectuals, and anti-communist activists as a communist party stooge on the one hand and equally distrusted towards the end of the Communist era by Honneker and his supporters as a cosmopolitan Jew.Kaufman takes us on a historical journey of Eastern Europe after the war describing how the former centers of European Judaism such as Budapest, Warsaw and Berlin had become virtually bereft of Jews, those remaining appearing as ghostly reminders of what Europe had lost in terms of art, culture, science and commerce as well its very soul. What the Nazis tried through violence to do the communists through enforced assimilation almost succeeded in doing and that was to obliterate Jewish presence finally from the communist European map.The book ends optimistically if not somewhat triumphally. The next generation of Jews in countries such as Germany, Hungary, Poland and former Czechoslovakia are now looking forward to a renaissance of Jewish life since the fall of Communism which many of the figures drawn in the book could only dream about during the dark days of Communist rule.