Customer Reviews

Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album

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At the moment this book on "Jewish Baltimore" is most popular in Baltimore (#1) and Pikesville, MD (#3). Little wonder it should be selling well in Baltimore and Pikesville, a suburb adjoining Northwest Baltimore, part of the Greater Baltimore Jewish ghetto.

In "Jewish Baltimore" Gilbert Sandler recounts the long, slow trek of Baltimore's Jews from East Baltimore (where my father was born) through Northwest Baltimore (where my parents first lived after they married) to the neighborhoods of Forest Park and Park Heights Avenue (where my grandmother Julie lived) on to Pikesville (where I grew up) and even further northwest to Owings Mills.

"Many of Sandler's essays invoke famous names in Baltimore history," says the blurb on the book's dustcover. Included among the "famous names" Sandler invokes is my family's name, which never seemed famous to me when I was a child (or thereafter).

The book has two main features: essays and photographs. A number of the essays are based on columns Sandler has written over the years for the Baltimore Sun newspaper and for the Baltimore Jewish Times. The book is subtitled quite aptly "A Family Album. " It is a photo album of all of Baltimore's Jewry. The photos are superbly chosen and the captions are well researched, nicely written, and enhance the excellent pictures.

Historically, Jewish Baltimore was decidedly not a single community. There were separate German Jewish and "Russian" (really Central and Eastern European) Jewish communities. And they were truly separate. The German Jews had come first to Baltimore and they looked down on the "Russian" Jews.

This book is bittersweet for me. It brings back some wonderful people to me, some who are now dead. But it also brings back to me the feelings of discomfort, even pain, I felt about the highly segregated situation in which we then lived where the "colored people" lived separately from the "white people," where Jews lived separately from those who were not Jewish, and where German Jews lived apart from the "Russian" Jews. All of these and other ghettos around Baltimore were based on "restricted housing" covenants and on the ingrained narrow customs of prejudice.

Gilbert Sandler evokes with warmth the history of Jewish Baltimore and he neatly skirts most of the less warm and cozy memories some of us have who lived as members of Jewish Baltimore.

A lovely "Family Album" it is. An account with balance between the bitter and the sweet it is not.

This is a book that could describe my life in pictures.

I was born in Pikesville and had lived there all my childhood. I grew up living nearby my grandparents on Park Heights Avenue, grew up knowing every place of Reisterstown Road. And I grew up as a Jewish girl who went to Camp Louise every summer of her life and spent those lazy summers on the White House (Camp Louise) lawns making friends with girls who even now I still keep in touch with.

It's a book that'll describe your life. Trust me: it described mine.

What a wonderful experience it was to turn the pages of this book. Imagine seeing your high school after many decades or being reintroduced to foods, customs, and places that you have long forgotten about. Each page brought the return of memories of my life growing up, or reviews of people and places before my time that had an influence on my life. There were many pictures of people in my family (especially those of older generations)and I will look forward to sharing this family tree with my children. I even learned some new things about my family and my birth city. Memories abound.