Customer Reviews

Shayndl and Salomea: From Lemberg to Berlin (Jewish Lives)

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In 1999, while living in Berlin and planning a trip to Lemberg (Lviv), I met the author and bought this memoir. I had hoped to learn a bit about Jewish life in pre-1939 Berlin and Lemberg. I was sorely disappointed.

The depiction of life in Lemberg and Berlin is superficial, but one should keep in mind how old the author was at the time of the story. The author has chosen to use her memoir as a form of cathartic therapy. She goes to lengths to portray her family negatively, and she gratuitously dwells on her psychosexual development as a child. Her psychological difficulties as an adult in Australia do not really have much relevance to the story of central European Jewry living under the shadow of doom.

Is there anything redeeming about this book? Some of the descriptions of her family's difficulties in Berlin are interesting, and the accompanying essay is not bad. This memoir is the sort of work that merits only the barest of mentions in a scholarly bibliographic essay or the bibliography of an academic work on prewar Berlin Jewry. The casual reader will likely find that he has wasted his time and money.