Around 1900 Jewish Europe is not a museum. It is Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw, coffeehouses in Vienna, a Vilna that thinks in several languages, and an argument in every family about whether the future is here, in America, or in Palestine.
The pressure
Emancipation and pogrom live next door. After 1881 pogroms and poverty send some two million Jews west out of the Russian Empire; in Paris the Dreyfus affair shows how thin equality can be. From 1933 Germany strips its Jews of rights, with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and synagogues burned across the country in November 1938. Most countries keep their doors nearly shut to the refugees.
Which future
The Bund, the Jewish socialists, want a future here, in Yiddish. Zionists build one in Palestine. Assimilationists ask to be citizens of the states they already serve. None of them is preparing for what arrives.
What survived
From 1941 German squads and their helpers shoot Jews across the occupied east; from 1942 trains carry them to the death camps. By 1945 six million are dead, among them some three million Polish Jews, nine in ten of that community. Survivors are in displaced-persons camps, on ships to Palestine, or silent.
Whose story
Bernard Wasserstein insists the living world be studied as itself, not only as the victims it became. Each country still tells its end its own way: a European civilisation destroyed, a prelude to Israel, a Polish tragedy, a German crime.