The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33 - cover image

Copyright

Yankev Leshchinsky

Published On

2023-03-08

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80064-990-3
Hardback978-1-80064-991-0
PDF978-1-80064-992-7
HTML978-1-80064-996-5
XML978-1-80064-995-8
EPUB978-1-80064-993-4
AZW3978-1-80064-994-1

Language

  • English
  • Yiddish

Print Length

178 pages (xxii+156)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 13 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.51" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 16 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.63" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback352g (12.42oz)
Hardback517g (18.24oz)

Media

Illustrations8
Tables7

OCLC Number

1372295823

LCCN

2021385334

BIC

  • HBLW
  • HBTZ
  • JFSR1

BISAC

  • HIS022000
  • SOC007000
  • HIS010010
  • HIS037070

LCC

  • DS134.55

Keywords

  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • socioeconomics
  • politics
  • Jews
  • Eastern Europe
  • Ukraine
  • sociology
  • interwar period
  • Poland
  • nationalism
  • pogroms
  • history
  • Holocaust

The Last Years of Polish Jewry

Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays, 1927–33

  • Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
  • Robert Brym (translator)
  • Eli Jany (translator)
  • Robert Brym (editor)
This book is part of a 2-volume set. The other volume in the set is:
Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876–1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English.

The Last Years of Polish Jewry helps to rectify this situation by translating some of Leshchinsky’s key essays. A thoughtful Introduction by Robert Brym provides the context of the author’s life and work.

The essays in this volume, based on years of research and first-hand observation, focus on the period 1927–33. The rise of militant Polish nationalism and the ensuing anti-Jewish boycotts and pogroms; the increasing exclusion of Jews from government employment and the universities; the destitution, hunger, suicide, and efforts to emigrate that characterized Jewish life; the psychological toll taken by mass uncertainty and hopelessness—all this falls within the author’s ambit. Few works in English have the range and depth of Leshchinsky’s essays on the last years of the three million Polish Jews who were to perish at the hand of the Nazi regime.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students of Eastern European history and society, especially those with an interest in Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities on the brink of the Holocaust.

Endorsements

Yankev Leshchinsky wanted to believe that Jewish life could thrive in modern Eastern Europe. But unable to cease asking trenchant sociological questions, unable to look away, he did more than any other scholar of his age to anatomize the foreclosure of Jewish prospects by the crisis of capitalism, economic nationalism, and rising antisemitism. No student of Jewish life in Poland and Eastern Europe as a whole can proceed without this indispensable work, and generations of students and scholars will be in Robert Brym’s debt.

Kenneth B. Moss

Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History and the College, University of Chicago

Reviews

[Leshchinsky's] books and articles remain until today among the most important sources on Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Now we can read one of his books in English in the volume, The Last Years of Polish Jewry: At the Edge of the Abyss, 1927-33, edited by Professor Robert Brym....The second volume of this project will hopefully soon be published.

Mikhail Krutikov, Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and associate, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

"He Foresaw the Downfall of Polish Jewry 10 Years before the Holocaust". Forverts (Forward), 2023.

Full Review

Contents

Introduction

(pp. xi–xviii)
  • Robert Brym

1. On the Sociology of Polish Jewry

(pp. 1–30)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

2. The birth pangs of the Jewish working class

(pp. 31–44)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

3. The heritage of the Jewish factory owner

(pp. 45–56)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

4. National Bolshevism

(pp. 59–70)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

5. A flood of small promissory notes

(pp. 71–80)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

6. Jews are collapsing in the streets from hunger

(pp. 81–94)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

7. At night in the old market

(pp. 95–102)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

8. Three-quarters of the Jewish population lack enough to live on

(pp. 103–112)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

9. The destruction of Jewish economic life in Lodz

(pp. 113–124)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

10. Fallen Jewish Vilna

(pp. 125–134)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

11. The superfluous

(pp. 135–140)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

12. Emigration tragedies

(pp. 141–148)
  • Yankev Leshchinsky
  • Robert Brym
  • Eli Jany

Contributors

Yankev Leshchinsky

(author)

Robert Brym

(translator)
SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Eli Jany

(translator)
PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto

Eli Jany is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has translated poems by Sarah Reisen (In geveb, 12 May 2020, https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen) and, with Robert Brym, co-translated volume 1 of The Last Years of Polish Jewry and “Jewish Economic Life in Yiddish Literature: Yitskhok Ber Levinzon and Yisroel Aksenfeld,” East European Jewish Affairs (53, 1: 2024), both by Yankev Leshchinsky.

Robert Brym

(editor)
SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym