Lithuania Books

I absolutely loved this book! In 150, fast moving, well-written pages Irena Guilford manages to capture the first generation Lithuanian experience PERFECTLY. She not only demonstrates a profound understanding of the common guilt and responsibility that Lithuanian exiles felt, and still feel, for their homeland and the loved ones left behind, (and for the "true" or "new" Lithuanians who have come to the America's, post 1990, with their feelings of resentment at having been left behind the Soviet curtain to suffer, both physically and economically)but for her generation, my generation, caught between these two worlds. Belonging to both -- to neither. Anyone who grew up first generation Lithuanian, will think that this jewel was written specifically about them!

An important book treating a serious subject with charm and humor through brief, poetic vignettes. The wanderings of a Jewish family come alive without pathos or sentimentality, taking the reader from their home in Lithuania in the 1920's through Germany and Switzerland, to arrival in the United States in 1939. I have given this book as a Bar/Bat Mitzvah present and been told that the whole family was entranced by it.

As a counterpoint to her more comprehensive scholarly work on the holocaust, this book provides several personal vignettes of that period in history. Beginning in New York City the account covers making arrangements for the trip, the author's stay in Vilna, a center of Jewish culture in Poland including elements of daily life, cultural, and political events, her narrow escape from Poland as the Nazi invasion progresses, and the finally agonizing wait in New York as news of the insuing catastrophy arrives in bits and pieces. This book provides insight into what it was like to live through that period in history, and may help those close to them to understand people who actually lived through it.

As a South African living in Europe with a similar and yet in many ways different background, I am able to identify with Mr Jacobson's sensitive account of his search for his family roots in Lithuania. The construction of the work itself is a masterpiece: first his perception of Lithuania from South Africa, then his childhood in South Africa and then the encounter with Lithuania, where he finds nothing concrete and yet conveys the atmosphere of what he finds so movingly. The touching letter to his grandfather and his dream at the end are full of feeling and yet not in the least sentimental. This book has deeply impressed me and given me a wonderfully tragic picture of Lithuania.

An excellent work on one town's experience in the Holocaust. It contains an excellent array of documents from the time, hidden at great risk by the inhabitants. This book should dissuade any reader of the notion that the Jews of Europe did not fight back.

There is no way that a description of European Jewish life in the Holocaust can be other than lacerating. That said this small exploration of the resistance of the mind and escape from the physical prison which trapped the Jewish community by their holding tenaciously to the cultural attachment to the written word is remarkable. People, from little children to the elderly, despite the utter horror of their surroundings, made use of books. The image of libraries - still with an overdue system intact - of libraries to which one had to contribute a book to become a borrower - and of the desperate Warsaw fighters hidden behind a case of books are simply a few of the remarkable images that fill this work. If an escape or resistance of the spirit were possible surely this was it; what did those doomed people read to escape from or place a context to their unimaginably horrible experience. It is hard not to take some pleasure in the idea that there were such books - Shavit tells quite precisely what they were and who read them - but sadly notes books were hidden for readers who never returned, the Yiddish literature that has survived in largest quatities was, ironically, that confiscated by the Nazis, and in the end a few of the thumbed, tattered books remained but finally there were no more readers.

This book was fascinating, and should be required reading in all History classes.

This memoir is a great and important work. Mishell was one of the few survivors of the Kovno ghetto, and if one wishes to learn about the destruction of Jews on Soviet territory, this is the book to read.

This book is a cultural introduction into the people, culture, and history of Lietuva (Lithuania). Any title under Cultures of the World Series is usually very good and this title for Lithuania is reasonably good. This book is good for kids and adults as well that are interested in learning about this Baltic country.

For a little book, this gem is full of interesting information and neat little facts. It is a quick read but very worthwhile. Would recommend it for anyone wishing to travel to Lithuania or anyone with Lithuanian ancestory wanting to learn about their history.