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Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory

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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.

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.

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.

This book presents an excellent historical account of Jewish life in Czernowitz and the interplay with The Hapsburg Empire, as well as Romania. In addition, the authors introduce readers to the situation there today as part of Ukraine. A combination of personal, family testimonies and historical facts, is very effective. This book served as a great inspiration for a trip I just completed to the city. The book should be of great interest to any Jew or historian with ties and/or interest to the region. It is a must read if you are planning a trip to Czernowitz.

About ten years ago we were able to see a German documentary
on post-Shoah Czernowitz. Till then the city had been the site of
the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference, but after watching the
documentary, Czernowitz became a bastion of German language and culture
that had marked as well it's relatively large Jewish community.
We had to wait several years to visit Czernowitz,till a flight from Kiev made the city easily accesible.
We found an Ukranian city that was trying to preserve its six
centuries of history and its Habsburgian days and we were able to
retrace its Jewish past, that is slowly fading away.
Back from our trip we were lucky to find Marianne Hisch and Leo Spizer's book "Ghosts of Home. The Afterlife of Czernowitz in
Jewish Memory". and through its pages we got acquainted with the
recent and painful past of its Jewish community. The streets,
houses, buildings, memorials that we had just seen, acquired a
new life through the book's pages, that mark the days and years of
a family and its friends going trhough the hell of the "special"
Romanian Holocaust. The authors' visits to the city helped us to
see Czernowitz in a different perspective, as "Ghosts of Home"is a book that brings back the reality of midcentury life
in one of the many corners of Europe that perished forever, and
more important, it gives us a glimpse of the strength and courage
that enabled some people to face a period that nobody could have
foreseen.

This is a powerful and moving book, truly an extraordinary text. In many ways it is Marianne's Hotel Bolivia but also different. As a joint effort, indeed, a collective effort, it makes vivid and compelling the challenges of engaging in postmemory especially in relation to this most complicated place. Here postmemory for the second generation is a profoundly indirect and deeply mediated project. Czernowitz is multiply deferred making access that much more difficult. It was already lost as Marianne Hirsch's own parents lived it. The book does not shy away from all of these complications but instead brings readers into the intricacies of these multilayered stories of the past and an ever changing present.

The book accomplishes in showing all of this complexity is truly beautiful and compelling. I loved the movements back and forth from various pasts to and between different presents, and the ways the stories keep changing. My hope is to teach a small piece of the book in my Judaism graduate seminar in the fall just to help complicate what our graduate students in religion understand about the shifting borders, boundaries, languages and cultures of European Jewish life. I recommend this book to all who are interested in Jewish memory, in the politics and memory of place, and the legacies of European Jewish life.