Lithuania Books

There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok

Yaffa Eliach

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An important and moving book. 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 16 people found this review helpful.

This meticulously researched book chronicles the 900-year-old settlement of Eishyshok, a center of culture and tradition that was virtually extinguished by the Holocaust. Rather than focus on the terrible end, the author has endeavored to revive the town and its inhabitants through salvaged photographs, narratives, and history gathered over many years of travel and research. The author has produced a moving and well documented book that serves history while respecting and memorializing the individual people who gave the town its spirit. I have to doubt the motives of those who are using this review space to disect the author's own life and memories, which are not the subject of this book.

Editorial Review:

Eishyshok, in Lithuania, was for nine centuries a center of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, where Jews lived "under all the various governments that had fought for control of it: Lithuanian, Polish, German, Russian, and Soviet." But as a result of the Holocaust, writes Eishyshok native Yaffa Eliach in this rich, vastly detailed history, "nearly a millennium of vibrant Jewish life had been reduced to stark images of victimization and death." Eliach offers his chronicle by way of a memorial to those lost citizens and their disappeared history, working through archives, family photo albums, and the memories of survivors. It is a fine and fitting memorial indeed, one that ranks alongside the important work of Raul Hilberg and Lucy Dawidowicz. --Gregory McNamee

The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999

Timothy Snyder

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of four rival modern nationalist ideologies from common medieval notions of citizenship. He presents the ideological innovations and ethnic cleansings that abetted the spread of modern nationalism but also examines recent statesmanship that has allowed national interests to be channeled toward peace.

“A work of profound scholarship and considerable importance.”—Timothy Garton Ash, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford

“Timothy Snyder’s style is a welcome reminder that history writing can be—indeed, ought to be—a literary pursuit.”— Charles King, Times Literary Supplement

“A brilliant and fascinating analysis of the subtleties, complexities, and paradoxes of the evolution of nations in Eastern Europe. It has major implications for all of us who want to understand the processes of state collapse and nation-building in the world.”—Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies

“Snyder’s ultimate query in this fresh and stimulating look at the path to nationhood is how the bitter experiences along the way, including the bitterest—ethnic cleansing—are to be overcome.”
—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

• Awarded the George Louis Beer prize of the American Historical Association, 2003
• Awarded the Eastern Review prize, 2003

Timothy Snyder is assistant professor of history at Yale University.

The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence

Anatol Lieven

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

World attention has focused on the newly independent Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, as they struggle to become politically and economically viable. In this book, Anatol Lieven presents an intimate and engaging portrait of the history and culture of the Baltic states from their ancient origins to their contemporary status. He explores the culture and personality of the Baltic peoples, their religious and racial differences, their relations with Russia and with the West, and their prospects for the future. Lieven begins by describing the ancient Baltic peoples, their conquest by the Christians, the evolution of the Lithuanian empire and their union with Poland, and the experience of the Baltic provinces under the Russian Empire. He then looks at the countries' first struggle for independence in 1918, the failure of democracy and the establishment of authoritarian regimes, and the Soviet annexation of the Baltic in 1940. Lieven discusses the class structure of the Baltics and the ethnic tensions that have existed between the Germans, Jews, Poles, and Russians who live there. Drawing on a wide range of sources including interviews, newspaper accounts, and his own observations, he describes and analyzes the rise of national movements in each of the three countries after Glastnost. He concludes by discussing the new constitutions and the elections of 1992, the current forces of order, the demolition of the Soviety economies, and the possibilities for democracy and Europeanization or for ethnic conflict and nationalist dictatorship.

The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community 1316-1945

Masha Greenbaum

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

This is a general History with a lot of errors. 1 out of 5 stars.
22 of 24 people found this review helpful.

This is a poorly written general History. The title of the book is misleading. The book concentrates on the modern era. There is alot of imformation on the old Kehilla era of Jewish History. This is a period from 1400 - 1700 at least. This book gives only the minimal description of this era. The authors idea of Jewish History in that pre-modern era, which in Lithuania extended until the mid 1800's was to tell about the relationship that the ruler of that area had with the Jews. The reason that I gave this book such a low rating is that it is full of Historical errors. For example she writes that the Decembrist revolution happened in 1827, it really happened in 1825. While many of her Historical errors are minor, like saying that the infamous, 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', was written in 1928. When it comes to the History of the Orthodox and the Yeshivot, the book is full of gross errors and misunderstandings. As an exampe, her attempts to explain the reason why there was a rebellion in Slobodka against the 'Alter' and his form of Mussar is so wrong that it is comical. The 'Alter' had no official position in his own Yeshiva. A part of his form of Musar was allowing each student to develop on his own. Tight control was not part of this system. Saul Liberman, who later became the head of JTS - the Conservitive Seminary in the USA, learnt in Slobodka. Even though it was already known at that time that he had some liberal ideas. One of the Alter's most promenant students, R. Avrohom Elya Kaplen, later became head of the Rabbinical School in Berlin and was one the Rabbinical leaders of the Mizrachi movement. Another one of the Alter's students was R. Aharon Kotler who founded the most promenant 'Torah' only Yeshiva in the USA in Lakewood NJ. This is not the only gross error in the book. Another example is that she only gives the last un-official chief Rabbi of Vilna, Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky only one comment, and it isn't a positive one. R. Chiam Ozer was once offered the official title, but turned it down. He was one of the leaders of Lithuanian Jewry for over 40 years, and a fascinating and brilliant man. You would think that he deserves more than one negitive comment.

Editorial Review:

Fifth Edition. The full and fascinating history of this remarkable community, from its beginnings in the early part of the 14th century until its virtual destruction during the Holocaust. The book deals with the movements and personalities that played a role in the formation of the community.

Lithuania: The Rebel Nation (Westview Series on the Post-Soviet Republics)

V. Stanley Vardys, Judith Sedaitis, Mrs V Stanley Vardys

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Editorial Review:

In 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to break with the communist empire by declaring the restitution of political independence. Depicting a country at the crossroads of imperial designs, Vardys and Sedaitis trace the history, development, and ultimate triumph of the Lithuanian nation.They begin by exploring Lithuania’s pagan ancestry and epochal struggles with Germanic and Russian states, with special emphasis on the first period of political independence between the two World Wars and on the effort to regain freedom in the wake of the perestroika reforms. The authors conclude by examining Lithuania’s struggle with the legacy of Soviet rule as it strives to establish democracy and economic prosperity.

The Bronski House: A Return to the Borderlands

Philip Marsden

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Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival

Donald L. (ed.) Niewyk

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Editorial Review:

In 1946, a Russian-born American psychologist named David P. Boder toured displaced-persons camps throughout Western Europe, interviewing victims of the Nazi terror, most of them Jews. His published reports were not widely circulated, writes editor Donald Niewyk, and in any event few people wanted to talk or hear about the Holocaust so soon after it had ended. With the passage of half a century and the passing of the generation of Shoah, Boder's reports, collected in Fresh Wounds, stand as valuable documents in the world's memory. His interviewees talk about their years in slavery, of disease and death, and of the daily work of living with their Nazi captors. Many of the interviewees went on to live in the United States, and in Israel, where they founded kibbutzim.

Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem

Solly Ganor

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The best personal account of the Holocaust I've read. 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

In LIGHT ONE CANDLE, Solly Ganor takes the reader into that nightmare world of the Holocaust--I could practically feel the harsh elements, the constant danger of the camps. This book isn't anther rote recitation of death counts. There's so much heart and compassion for all those sweptup in these horrors. The insights into camp life include the primal nature of life stripped to itsbasics--such as the "storyteller" who keeps the outside world and traditions alive. Particularly poignant is Cooky, Ganor's childhood friend whose account of the slaughter at the Ninth Fort is more compelling than Dante's own descent into Hell. Ipersonally feel Ganor's book is deserving of some national/international award. Actually, reading the book I wonder how Ganor got it all done. It must have been so painful to revisit these terrible, incomprehensible, sublime, poignant memories. To me it's the best book on the Holocaust, personal or otherwise--certainly it should be a companion to any serious study of this subject. To me it hits at the heart, gets into the soul. It's the humanity of the account,particularly those heart-rending final glimpses of the condemned trying to smile as they wave good-bye.

Editorial Review:

Forty-seven years after he was found half-dead in the snow, following a death march from Dachau, Solly Ganor again came face to face with his rescuer Clarence Matsumura at a reunion of Holocaust survivors and their American liberators. That meeting proved a catharsis, enabling Ganor to confront for the first time the catalogue of horrors he experienced during the Second World War. Beginning in prewar Lithuania, Light One Candle tells of the ominous changes that took place once Hitler came to power in 1933, of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul who wrote thousands of exit visas for Jews fleeing the Nazi onslaught, of the brutal conditions in the Kaunas ghetto where Ganor spent most of the war, and of Stutthoff and Dachau, the concentration camps he was shuttled to and from in the last, desperate days of the war. Unflinching in its depiction of evil but uplifting in its story of the survival of the human spirit, Light One Candle is a gripping memoir that waited fifty years to be told.

The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition

Michael Good

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

On April 11, 2005, in Jerusalem, Karl Plagge will be named a "Righteous Among the Nations" hero by the State of Israel. He joins Oskar Schindler and some 380 other similarly honored Germans who protected and saved Jews during the Holocaust.

Karl Plagge’s story is of a unique kind of courage—that of a German army officer who subverted the system of death to save the lives of some 250 Jews in Vilna, Lithuania. One of those he saved was Michael Good’s mother.

Haunted by his mother’s stories of the mysterious officer who commanded her slave labor camp, Michael Good resolved to find out all he could about the enigmatic "Major Plagge." For five years, he wrote hundreds of letters and scoured the Internet to recover, in one hard-earned bit of evidence after another, information about the man whose moral choices saved hundreds of lives. This unforgettable book is the first portrait of a modest man who simply refused to play by the rules.

Interviewing camp survivors, opening German files untouched for more than fifty years, and translating newly discovered letters, Good weaves an amazing tale. An engineer from Darmstadt, Plagge joined, and then left, the Nazi Party. In Vilna, in whose teeming ghetto tens of thousands of Jews faced extermination, he found himself in charge of a camp where military vehicles were repaired. Time after time, he saved Jews from prison, SS death squads, and the ghetto by issuing them work permits as "indispensable" laborers essential to the war effort.

Karl Plagge never considered himself a hero, describing himself as a fellow traveler for not doing more to fight the regime. He said that he saved Jews—and others— because "I thought it was my duty." This book also reminds us of the many ways human beings can resist evil. "There are always some people," Pearl Good said of the man who saved her life when he didn’t have to, "who decide that the horror is not to be."

The History of the Baltic States (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations)

Kevin O'Connor

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Baltic states--Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--are nestled in northeastern Europe, where they lie at a crossroad of European culture. Collectively, they have been both a transmitter of culture and a victim of larger, more powerful nations' aspirations. Their ethnically and religiously diverse natives continue to struggle with the question of identity, yet the Balts have had relatively peaceful relations with each other for some 600 years. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Baltic states "returned to Europe" and seem intent on preserving the spirit of cooperation and solidarity that emerged during their struggle for independence more than a decade ago. This is the most recent and up-to-date narrative history of the Baltic states, providing readers with an ideal starting point for research on the area. It includes a timeline of major events, biographic sketches of noteworthy historical figures, a glossary, and a bibliographic essay. The Baltic states' survival and recovery during the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era is an inspiring and fascinating tale. This concise history takes readers from the ice ages through the Cold War, telling the tale of these small but important countries and their role in the history of Europe.