The author relates the remarkable story of his pianist mother and her sister, child prodigies who escaped certain death when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, adopted new identities, and came under the protection of a Nazi commander who heard them play.

This is a life, in stories, of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760), the founder of Hasidism. The Baal Shem Tov, or the Besht, as he is commonly called, led a revival in Judaism that put love and joy at the center of religious life and championed the piety of the common folk against the rabbinic establishment. He has been recognized as one of the greatest teachers in Jewish history, and much of what is alive and vibrant in Judaism today, in all denominations, derives from his inspiration. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was descended from several illustrious Hasidic dynasties, wrote: "The Baal Shem Tov brought heaven to earth. He and his disciples, the Hasidim, banished melancholy from the soul and uncovered the ineffable delight of being a Jew.">

A rabbi remembers her life as a child in Kiev, Ukraine, where her family lived under Soviet rule until they moved to the United States when she was fifteen.

Memoirs of a Jew born in 1937 in Odessa, relating his childhood experiences in the postwar period. Popular antisemitism was rampant in Odessa, and the people in power, from school teachers to local authorities, turned a blind eye to it. Between 1948-53 popular antisemitism gave way to officially-sponsored antisemitic campaigns. Draitser, who had a traditional Jewish upbringing, was taught to be quiet, to maintain a low profile, and never to stress his Jewishness publicly. Contends that all Soviet Jews of his generation received the same upbringing of self-hatred, learned fear (including fear of "gentile" women), and an inferiority complex. In 1974 he emigrated to the USA. Describes, also, his family's evacuation from Odessa in 1941, and how some relatives perished either in German-occupied Minsk or in Ukraine.

Arnold Daghani (1909-85) came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Suczawa, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Romania. His understated narrative of his experiences in the slave labour camp at Mikhailowka, south west Ukraine (1942-43), presented here in its first English book edition, provides a day-by-day account of the chilling experiences of Jewish slave labourers. It is written in a compelling style and illustrated by watercolours and drawings that Daghani made secretly in captivity and smuggled out of the camp and a Romanian ghetto. It includes an extraordinary account of the couple's escape and the shooting of over three hundred prisoners. The uniqueness of Daghani's Holocaust testimony lies in his role as an artist which led to his (and his wife's) escape from the camp and their survival. The camps in Ukraine have been under-investigated and the diary provides significant material. It was used as the basis of investigations in the 1960s into war crimes in the slave labour camps in Ukraine, helping to bring attention to the region and providing some form of recognition for those who suffered there. This richly illustrated and scrupulously edited book is distinguished from more conventional Holocaust memoirs by focusing on fundamental questions of historical testimony and the problems of representation in both words and images. Daghani's diary is contextualized on the basis of wide-ranging new historical, archival and art historical research in essays that document the artist's attempts to achieve justice and reconciliation. They locate the diary in relation to contemporary issues on migration and statelessness, genocide and trauma, self-reflection and memory. The diary is both art and document, addressing how we understand and construct history. It enables readers to engage with the Holocaust via the viewpoint of an individual, making statistics more meaningful and history less distant.

It was the dawn of the twentieth century. A new spirit of freedom, tolerance and hope was sweeping the world, but in reactionary Czarist Russia, a macabre, thoroughly medieval drama was unfolding - a blood libel! A Christian child was found murdered in a suburb of Kiev, and a Jewish factory manager named Mendel Beilis was accused of killing and using his blood for the Passover matzos. This preposterous charge and the arrest and trial of Mendel Beilis, an obviously innocent scapegoat, scandalized the modern world. The battle lines were drawn between the enlightened and the bigoted. Mendel Beilis became more than an innocent man falsely accused. He became a cause celebre, a gallant symbol of the fight against the forces of darkness that would soon engulf the world in a disastrous war. The first edition of Mendel Beilis' autobiography was self-published in New York in 1926 under the title The Story of My Sufferings. This new edition, Scapegoat on Trial: The Story of Mendel Beilis, has been newly annotated and revised to correct the awkwardness of the original translation from the Yiddish. It also features an insightful introduction, which provides an illuminating historical context.

The unfinished memoirs of Hugo Gryn (1930-1996), born in Berehove, Ruthenia, completed by his daughter. Ch. 11-13 (pp. 123-229), written by Gryn in the USA in 1951, describe his experiences in the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a teenager. In April 1944 Gryn and his family, with the other Jews of Berehove, were interned in a nearby brick factory. In June 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz. Gryn and his father were then sent to the Lieberose concentration camp in Upper Silesia. Naomi Gryn pieces together the remaining account from various writings and interviews, describing a death march which ended at Gunskirchen. Gryn's father succumbed there, shortly after the liberation; his brother perished at Auschwitz, but his mother survived. Gryn moved to England with a group of child survivors in 1946, and later became a well-known rabbi.

Six Chassidic dynasties, going back to the Baal Shem Tov, converged in the late 19th century Rebbe of Hornosteipel. This legacy, the foundation of his development as a tzaddik, was expressed in numerous facets of his highly refined personality as well

"City of lions presents two essays, written more than a half century apart-but united by one city"--Book flap.