The Last Generation of Jews in Poland

The sense of a mighty, profound pulsation of national life still animated Polish Jews in the last two decades of their existence, 1919-1939—perhaps one of the most beautiful modes of Jewish life in the diaspora, with Ḥasidism as “Polish Jewry’s gift to the Jewish people.”

To capture the spiritual and intellectual ferment that animated Polish Jewry in those interbellum years, the author weaves memories of his youth into the story of the Jewish world he knew in his native Lodz. From his roots in the pietistic world of Ḥasidism and his later immersion in a secular Zionist high school, he invokes programs of «salvation» that shift from passive submission to God’s will to political, social and national activism.