Amazon.com Review
Jewish Roots in Poland: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories, by Miriam Weiner, is a big and beautiful book, in more ways than one. It is illustrated with hundreds of antique and contemporary photographs of Polish cities and towns; and the depth and scope of its genealogical resource lists will help many Jews find amazing truths about their heritage. It's estimated that upwards of 75 percent of American Jews can trace at least one grandparent to Poland as it was defined before the Nazi invasion of 1939. Their search for roots will be inestimably assisted by Weiner's guide to extant documents such as tax rolls and Jewish community records. This book makes no pretense to being a literary triumph, but its practical usefulness makes Jewish Roots in Poland a poignant tribute to the ancestors of today's Diaspora--which means it is also, effectively, an invaluable tool for charting Jewish people's future. --Michael Joseph Gross
Review
Archives of Innocence
For centuries until the Nazis, Poland was the heart of Jewish life in Europe. More than 75 percent of American Jews, it is estimated, can trace at least one grandparent to somewhere in Poland as it existed before the German onslaught of 1939. Poland's Jews bore the brunt of the Holocaust. But a significant part of their history has survived in municipal and Jewish archives. Jewish Roots In Poland: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories (Roots to Roots Foundation / YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, $50), by Miriam Weiner, a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Jewish Genealogy, offers an authoritative guide to what records still exist and where they can be found. A town-by-town index to archives shows, for example, that in Lublin tax rolls go back to 1716 and Jewish community records to 1775. But there is far more than archival listings. There are hundreds of poignant photographs and old tinted postcards of scenes from the early years of the century, panoramas of aching nostalgia, given what we know about what was to come. A 1916 picture of a town square in Oswiecim, near what was to become the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, serves as a reminder that before such places became synonyms for horror, they were just places, with streets where people shopped and children played. -- NY Times Review 4/05/98
