In modern-day Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the "Vienna of the East" under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II--yet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore--but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Hirsch and Spitzer present the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language and offer a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.
Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory
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"[This] monumental book . . . is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search. [It] reads with the poignancy of memoir, yet in a collective voice. . . . The overarching authorial voice is nuanced and reflective but also informed. "--Pri's the World
"Hirsch and Spitzer expose the complex layers that inform our understanding of the past.--Jewish Book World
"Unique . . . Ghosts of Home collects the fragments of one place and provides us with an artifact that is as close as we will ever come to 'perfect rest.'"--Tikkun Magazine
"An interesting volume."--German Studies Review
"The ability to observe, evaluate, and contextualize habits and specific objects is one of the greatest strengths of this book."--Austrian History Yearbook
"Hirsch and Spitzer expose the complex layers that inform our understanding of the past.--Jewish Book World
"Unique . . . Ghosts of Home collects the fragments of one place and provides us with an artifact that is as close as we will ever come to 'perfect rest.'"--Tikkun Magazine
"An interesting volume."--German Studies Review
"The ability to observe, evaluate, and contextualize habits and specific objects is one of the greatest strengths of this book."--Austrian History Yearbook
From the Inside Flap
"In this rigorous and beautifully written account, Hirsch and Spitzer chronicle a search for a vanished world and, through the terrible lacuna of the Holocaust, discover the life before and after. Simultaneously a history of a fascinating Central European town, an excavation of a thriving culture, and a journal of several returns, Ghosts of Home adds both scholarly and human dimensions to our knowledge of the Holocaust, the vicissitudes of memory, the predicament of the second generation, the poignant impossibility of recapturing the past - and the need to understand and honor it in its full complexity."--Eva Hoffman, author of Time
"This exemplary masterpiece of cultural memory interweaves the thoughtful reflections of the post-memorial family memoir with astute historical recontextualisation of one family's experiences of the complex Jewish negotiations of cultural modernity and shifting political dominions in Central Europe. Built around the figure of the journey that takes the reader back and forth across the layered histories of the city of former Czernowitz the text explores the fabric of memory in places, images and things which have the affective power to undo amnesia. This book re-engages us not only with an important fragment of 'the past' but asks us to think about what it means to carry lost histories, intergenerationally, and to transform 'the past' by tenderly and thoughtfully reinserting such memories, often transmitted by images and objects, into the still fragile picture of the experience of European Jews across the long twentieth century."--Griselda Pollock, author of Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive
"Ghosts of Home is a compelling cross-generational memoir of Czernowitz, once a vital center of a fragile German-Jewish cultural symbiosis in the outer reaches of the Habsburg Empire. Hirsch and Spitzer have created a remarkable narrative of live voices, documents, photographs, travelogues, and memorabilia out of which emerges the 'idea of Czernowitz,' ghostlike and filled with gaps, but like a promise of another history which was not to be. This is embodied cultural history at its best."--Andreas Huyssen, author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
"In Ghosts of Home, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have written a remarkable inter-generational memoir of Czernowitz and its remarkable German-Jewish cultural world, vanished in the Holocaust. With grace and precision, they use both history and memory to shape a profound set of reflections on loss and survival. Anyone interested in reading a verse of Celan or a short story of Appelfeld should start here. What a gift to join these two scholars on their moving, penetrating journey back to what was once home, somewhere in the now-vanished Jewish world of Czernowitz."--Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
"In a very fine intertwining between the private and the public, this book evokes landscapes of memory animated by ghosts emerging from the past. Hirsch and Spitzer provide us with a multifaceted image of the complex universe of memory. This volume is an important contribution to our way of conceiving the practice of history, its meaning and methodology, its struggle against the unknowns of memory and its choice to give up the claim to omniscience. It is also a delicate and moving story of how individuals connect to each other in the effort to give us back the richness and frailty of the past. For us readers, like for the children of survivors, a passage of memories takes place that allows us to say 'it's our story now.'"--Luisa Passerini, author of Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity
"This is an engaging and exciting multilayered, guided tour through the city of many names--Czernowitz/Chernivtsi/Cernauti--that perhaps never existed except in memories, dreams, and nightmares. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer's work is an experiment in story-telling, part history and part dialogical memoir that incorporates voices of parents, survivors, and witnesses and is full of precise and poignant details."--Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia
"This exemplary masterpiece of cultural memory interweaves the thoughtful reflections of the post-memorial family memoir with astute historical recontextualisation of one family's experiences of the complex Jewish negotiations of cultural modernity and shifting political dominions in Central Europe. Built around the figure of the journey that takes the reader back and forth across the layered histories of the city of former Czernowitz the text explores the fabric of memory in places, images and things which have the affective power to undo amnesia. This book re-engages us not only with an important fragment of 'the past' but asks us to think about what it means to carry lost histories, intergenerationally, and to transform 'the past' by tenderly and thoughtfully reinserting such memories, often transmitted by images and objects, into the still fragile picture of the experience of European Jews across the long twentieth century."--Griselda Pollock, author of Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive
"Ghosts of Home is a compelling cross-generational memoir of Czernowitz, once a vital center of a fragile German-Jewish cultural symbiosis in the outer reaches of the Habsburg Empire. Hirsch and Spitzer have created a remarkable narrative of live voices, documents, photographs, travelogues, and memorabilia out of which emerges the 'idea of Czernowitz,' ghostlike and filled with gaps, but like a promise of another history which was not to be. This is embodied cultural history at its best."--Andreas Huyssen, author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
"In Ghosts of Home, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have written a remarkable inter-generational memoir of Czernowitz and its remarkable German-Jewish cultural world, vanished in the Holocaust. With grace and precision, they use both history and memory to shape a profound set of reflections on loss and survival. Anyone interested in reading a verse of Celan or a short story of Appelfeld should start here. What a gift to join these two scholars on their moving, penetrating journey back to what was once home, somewhere in the now-vanished Jewish world of Czernowitz."--Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
"In a very fine intertwining between the private and the public, this book evokes landscapes of memory animated by ghosts emerging from the past. Hirsch and Spitzer provide us with a multifaceted image of the complex universe of memory. This volume is an important contribution to our way of conceiving the practice of history, its meaning and methodology, its struggle against the unknowns of memory and its choice to give up the claim to omniscience. It is also a delicate and moving story of how individuals connect to each other in the effort to give us back the richness and frailty of the past. For us readers, like for the children of survivors, a passage of memories takes place that allows us to say 'it's our story now.'"--Luisa Passerini, author of Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity
"This is an engaging and exciting multilayered, guided tour through the city of many names--Czernowitz/Chernivtsi/Cernauti--that perhaps never existed except in memories, dreams, and nightmares. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer's work is an experiment in story-telling, part history and part dialogical memoir that incorporates voices of parents, survivors, and witnesses and is full of precise and poignant details."--Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Superb Reading of the Mind and Place,
By
This review is from: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Kindle Edition)
A journey through another family's memory can often be difficult to grasp, but this superbly written book takes a firm hold of not only your mind, but also your heart. This book goes well beyond others in this genre and marries the vivid and incredibly enlightening description of a bygone era with the memories of those living in the present. The use of real-time memory in literally tracing the footsteps of a past series of events through this city's finest moments and darkest hours offers a unique approach to uncovering the inner light of the author's parents in constructing this compelling narrative. Parsing these memories into components ranging from horrific trauma to youthful exuberance, it permits the reader to feel the full range of emotions of not just the characters in the story, but also the writers. This book clearly provides us not simply with a history of a city as much as it provides us with a history of people's memories of a city, some of whom were experiencing its streets, apartments, cemeteries, and cafes some 70 years after the memories were initially made. In joining the memories of those who experienced the ups and downs of this period with the memories of those who first experienced them through indirect storytelling and then through directly tracing the footsteps of the past, the book provides the reader with a valuable blueprint for understanding how we remember and re-remember. I did not come away from this book either depressed or sickened despite the often deplorable events both witnessed and experienced during this time of radical change. Rather, I felt a hope that even after living through one of the lowest points in modern history, humanity and family finds a way through the telling of stories and the sharing of experience. I may have finished the book, but the book will never be finished with me.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The compelling story of Czernowitz,
By
This review is from: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Hardcover)
This is an excellent, captivating, and very well written story of Czernowitz, its communities and history. It brings to life a unique city and its culture through turbulent times. It is not by any means a compilation of holocaust atrocities. The events of this period are there, including the story of Vapniarka, the "forgotten camp", where my father was incarcerated, but not in a way that takes over the narration. My family lived there before the war and thus I have keen interest in this place. I also provided the authors some material from my archive. The story though is of universal value. It has Barbara Tuchman like liveliness and depth, with the added personal insight the authors bring to this subject. While the city is still there, and just celebrated its 600 years anniversary, it is not the culturally diverse and energetic place it used to be. This book compellingly describes its prewar life and how it continues to this date, in the virtual space, through the former inhabitants and their descendents . This book would be of great interest to history buffs, to memory scholars, to Jews, to Romanians who ruled the place between the wars, to Ukrainians, to Germans (and not just because of Paul Celan), and to many others looking for a well told special story.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ghosts and memories from an unforgotten cultural city,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Hardcover)
First a confession.My mother was born in Bukowina and spent most of her youth in Czenowitz.She used -and still uses- to tell me various stories from that dark period of the years 1940-1945.From time to time I let her know about some new items, articles or things that appear about Czernowitz.There are many things she has in common with most people mentioned in this new book,but the most significant fact for her which she always emphasized to me and others was that of the German culture which was to be the dominant factor in her life then.To tell the truth, Czernowitz has remained in her heart and soul and I am sure she will always be a Czernowitzer.The pride of her being able to recite from memory many poems and whole parts of plays which were written by such eminent literary figures such as Heine,Goethe or Schiller as well as the Romanian genius Eminescu causes the past to become even more prevalent in her daily life.Having asked her why she would not ever visit there,she replied that it would be a pity to see the city as it looks today and would definitely spoil her good memories from those times.Indeed ,there were also happy years and not everything was black.
By profession I am a teacher of English and a historian as well.My area of expertise is the Cold War and the role that intelligence services played during those times.Still,I got curious to know more about the city and its culture,and after having read some reports,books and articles which can easily be deemed as not serious and superficial, I made up my mind to finally read something which was well researched. Luckily, I came across this new book written by the two authors, both of them academics.Right from the beginning it was clear to me that book would be entirely different from what I had read so far. This volume embraces the approach of Alltagsgeschichte, or everyday history which has become so popular among many historians who prefer this style over the positivist approach which dominated the field of historical reseach, but which became marginal during the last three or four decades.It is a well-known fact that the new approach originates mainly in the French tradition called the Annales school.Those familiar with the terms need no elaboration on this.It would only be wise to state that this approach includes not only the exploration of various written sources but also the incorporation of testimonies rendered by people who lived through a certain historical era ,or in other words:oral history. This is exactly what happens in this book.This is not a book which one could easily classify according to a certain genre,be it historical,literary or anything else.It is not only a family chronicle,as the authors state in their introduction, but,in their words,it is "as hybrid in genre-as an intergenerational memoir and as an interdiciplinary and self-reflexive work of historical and cultural exploration.It engages many individual voices,including our own,within a web of narratives,recollections and interconnections,together with other historical and cultural source materials". Add the fact that there is a continuous dialogue between the past and the present and you will get a much more complicated yet richer picture of the key questions posed by the writers,among them being: how come that a small provincial city produced such a rich and urbane culture? Why have the Jews in Czernowitz preferred the German culture over other ones? How have the memories of the Czernowitz Jews pass down to the next generations? What was so special about the 600-year old city that was barely to be found in other similar loci? After all, the Holocaust of Czernowitz can easily be labeled as a part of the forgotten Holocaust of the Romanian Jewry.This happened because of the monopolization of the Holocaust by many Polish and Russian historians, authors and their collaborators in Israel and other academic or research institutes.It was only during the last 25 years when the Romanian Jewry Holocaust started to emerge to surface -and this due to some factors that are not relevant in our discussion here. To resolve these main issues, the authors have relied on historical and literary source materials and used official and private contemporary documents,public and archival materials, letters, memoirs, photographs,newspapers, essays, poetry, fiction,Internet postings and other testimonial objects.The result of all this is to be found in three main parts which constitute the core of the book and an epilogue.The result is impressive and the rich narrative and analysis attest to the fact that this is going to be one of the best-ever written books on Czernowitz,a city(and the memories and evoked) which was dissected, deconstructed and re-constructed by both writers .It was a very good idea to point out to the reader the various contradictions and unsolved issues concerning some personalities who played their part on the stage of history during the dark years of the Holocaust. However,let me mention my reservations about Chapter 11 of this opus where the authors refer the readers to various Internet sites that include materials on Czernowitz.In an academic work like this,it would have been much wiser to tell the reader about those sites in a detailed appendix, where everything regarding the city could be elaborated on.Ditto for the fact that the authors include a list of who met whom and when while visiting the city on various occasions and you get a reunion-style report which is totally unacceptable here.Second, the detailed and engrossing story of Vapniarka(Chapter 9)comes at the expense of other ghettoes which are mentioned only casually,such as the Moghilev ghetto.Albeit this,I can heartily recommend this book-which is a multi-layered interdisciplinary microhistory- not only to the Czernowitz Jews (who, despite the advanced German culture surrounding them of which they are so proud of, had not been able to produce eminent figures such as an Einstein or another Freud), but to anyone who is interested to find out about a lost culture which will probably be an inseparable part of some people's psyche in the future.
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