Buy used: $38.31

$5.23 delivery March 26 - 27. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by suomipac

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Follow the author

Jaff Schatz

Follow

The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Society and Culture in East-Central Europe) First Edition

by Jaff Schatz (Author)

3.5 2 ratings

See all formats and editions

Revolutionaries and rebels, shoemakers and tailors, refugees, soldiers, intellectuals, and apparatchiks. They were the extraordinary generation of Polish-Jewish Communists"the last true Communists," as some of them say today. With pathos and deeply informed insight, Jaff Schatz relates the life story of the Jews who joined the Polish Communist Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s, only to become its victims thirty years later.

Schatz draws on archival research and interviews with forty-three surviving members of this generation that gave up everything but their dream of a new world order. He frames the personal drama of their rise and fall with important questions about the interaction of biography and history, showing how the lives of The Generation uniquely concentrate the recent history of East-Central Europe.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Schatz stepped in, like few before him, at a precise moment when the questions were already clear and the answers to them still obtainable. The result is a document of lasting value." -- Zygmunt Bauman, Acta Sociologica

About the Author

Jaff Schatz is Director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and is affiliated with the Sociology Department at Lunds University in Sweden.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; First Edition (June 25, 1991)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 426 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0520071360
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0520071360
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,147,832 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,388 in Judaism (Books)
- #4,603 in Jewish Social Studies
- #5,233 in Historiography (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.5 2 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Jaff Schatz

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

3.5 out of 5

2 global ratings

5 star

0%

2 star

0%

1 star

0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Oskar Jaszi, Jr.

A rebuttal to Mr. Peczkis

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2006

This review is largely a rebuttal, of sorts, to the review already posted. It is quite obvious from Mr. Peczkis's tone that he identifies with many Poles who were incensed by Jan Blonski's much-needed 1987 article "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto" and by Jan Tomasz Gross's monumental work, Neighbors. Apparently Mr. Peczkis would like to pin all of Poland's communist-era woes on the handful of Jewish party members who possessed real power, without acknowledging the fact that by the 1960s Polish Jews suffered enormous repression at the hands of the Polish Communist govt., including loss of power within the party, and that by and large the history of Polish communism is that of a state governed--and, yes, supported--by ethnic Poles. Iy hardly needs be mentioned that Gomulka, Gierek, Moczar,and Jaruzelski were all proud members of the Polish nation, or that the quite blatantly antisemitic "anti-Zionist" campaign of the 1960s belies the reality of so-called Polish Jewish Zydokomuna.

Mr. Peczkis even goes so far as to anglicize Jan Tomasz Gross's middle name to Thomas, perhaps as a subtle (or not, but puerile nonetheless) method of questioning Gross's Polishness. Surely it is a sorry sign that Amazon allows such antisemitic rhetoric, dressed up in the guise of objective criticism, to appear on its website.

As for the merits of the above book, it is competent and made good use of the sources which were available at the time, but is somehwat dry in its prose, and perhaps in an effort to be objective does not make stronger, more conclusive arguments of the kind scholars look for, but if read in conjunction with Marci Shore's new monograph Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, the reader is treated to an enlightening narrative as to the reasons why a small group of Polish Jewish intellectuals found in Marxism a key to a better life. That they were sorely disappointed later, and indeed in many cases were broken by the beast they helped to create, is one of the twentieth century's more bitter ironies.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

John Nygate

They lived in interesting times (from the Chinese proverb)

Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2012

This is the story of "The Generation", Jews born in Poland roundabout 1910, who became communists. They had interesting lives, to say the least. Often from traditional Jewish families, most joined the party in adolescence, spending a spell in Polish prisons before the second world war, because party membership was a crime.
On the outbreak of the war, they fled to the Soviet Union where many were imprisoned in the gulag. Released from the gulag after the outbreak of the German Soviet War in 1941, many joined the communist armies and made their way back to Poland. Following the war, many achieved high positions in Poland's communist dictatorship. However in the late 1950s and 1960s their star began to wane and many were expelled from Poland following the victory of Israel in the 1967 war.

There is no doubt that most of them sincerely believed in Marxism/Leninism well into the 1950s and beyond, in spite of the show trials, and the denunciation of Stalin in the 1950s.

Mr Schatz wrote historical sociology, and the style of the book is academic and dry, though I think quite scholarly. In spite of this I found the book very interesting. The book gives great insight into the nature of communism and the mind set of communists.
A very worthwhile book, in my opinion.