Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories (The Jewish Genealogy Series) [Hardcover]

Miriam Weiner (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"From earliest dawn, mankind has been driven by the insatiable urge to assure proof of his presence and continuity by leaving a record, from cave drawings to the historical notes buried under the Warsaw Ghetto in World WarII. Cast out to an often foreboding world, the Jewish people have become masters of the archives.

Between the world wars, the Soviet Union isolated its Jewish minority. They were shorn of their synagogues, schools, books and most vestiges of Jewish life. We did not know if a Jewish community still existed. As a result of the Holocaust and the wars, documentation became more and more difficult to come by.

Miriam Weiner, a courageous and brilliant historian and archivist, has haunted the archives of Eastern Europe, painstakingly piecing together the world that was. Here she has memorialized hundreds of shtetls and towns through document examples and photographs. Her earlier book on Polish Jewry alerted us to the fact that she was equal to the task. "Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova" is part of a masterwork of love and remembrance, so important to me and my children." -- Leon Uris, author of "Exodus"

"Miriam Weiner's "Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova" is an invaluable source book replete with photographs, documents and archival inventories of a world that should be of vital interest to all who treasure the past and want to keep vivid our memories of it." -- Chaim Potok, author of "The Chosen"

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots (July 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965650812
• ISBN-13: 978-0965650816
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,196,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > History > Europe > Moldova

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At long last a pathway to our family history in Ukraine, August 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories (The Jewish Genealogy Series) (Hardcover)

I recently received my copy of this long awaited work by Miriam Weiner. In addition to providing the first tangible inventory of what the regional archives hold, in regard to the history of our Jewish families, this book gives a wonderful pictorial overview of the area. One which most of us could only imagine until now. It does so by providing photos of the places our families inhabited in the past, contrasted, in many instances, with how those same places appear now.

The vivid past jumps off the pages of this beautifully formatted book, just as the lure of the book's vast archive document inventory tempts the reader with its research possibilities for the future.

This book is a must for anyone contemplating research into their family history in Ukraine and Moldova, and a treasure for those who are merely curious about the world our ancestors lived in and left behind.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comments after initial orientation to the book, July 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories (The Jewish Genealogy Series) (Hardcover)

I read about this book in the August 2000 issue of National Georgraphic magazine, and grew very eager to read it. For years I've been searching for ways to explore family roots in Shepitikava, Ukraine, around and prior to 1920. This book provides details I would not have found anywhere unless I did the on site research the author Weiner has done. What a find! Aunts born in Shepitivka prior to 1920 still live today and will be mesmerized by the details I will soon point out to them. For that matter, their father, my grandfather, may well be pictured in one 1920 photo of Jewish men in Shepetivka at the cemetary's new gate.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting Gathering!, November 2, 2011

By 

William Bronston, MD - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories (The Jewish Genealogy Series) (Hardcover)

This is a unique and haunting work. Miriam Weiner is one of the rare souls who believe that memory and family history or indispensable to human society, personal identity, fulfilment and maybe the passage of meaning through to our children. This is monumental work filled with the most astounding collection of hundreds of photographs of people, places, buildings, collected from among the circumscribed community of Jewish peoples in the Ukraine and Moldova. Of course that is where my mother and father's parents derived which rivets me even more urgently to the encyclopedic information. They are dead now. My cousins, now in their late 60s and 70s, and mostly living in Paris, have no information from their war, revolution and pogrom traumatized parents, long gone, as the tumult of life in the late 19th and early 20th Century was overwhelming. Our parents shut off memory and stories from fear and safety, and only marginally and apocryphally shared tidbits with our generation. Thus, Miriam's scholarly and massive search is a work of sublime significance and worth the struggle for those who value knowing and caring about the mystery of family inheritance. Many of us owe a profound debt to her astounding genealogical documentation. When one is searching for a 'personal' connection, the huge information available and the dominant amount of photographic material is initially frustrating and initially distracting...but...at a point, the gestalt of the imagery and information has its humbling impact. All this starts as a reality forgotten, invisible, impossible to engage, remote, lost, sad, amazing, a world of people, styles, struggles, creativity, culture that in many instances shows the bland and flat culture in which we, in the 21st Century, now endure with all our meaningless and infinite consumer goods, comfort culture, alienation, lost histories, fragile identities and limited stories . Finding a copy of this book is an ordeal in itself. Affording it is another hurdle as I found another copy selling for over $700 (!) despite the $60 original 1999 copyrighted book jacket price. But for me, aching about the inability to ask my family, or any acquaintances about our origins, it is a priceless treasure that lavishes a look into a world gone forever. Miriam Weiners work is a service to human kind and a unique gift to those of us whose roots came deep from the drama of the Jewish Shtetls and the Pale.