The shocking story of a stray child and his wanderings in Poland during World War II. A young boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, wanders alone from one village to another in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. When the war separates a youth from his parents he begins a terrible odyssey of suffering as he wanders from village to village.

Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac explored the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, capturing life in the Jewish shtetlekh of Poland, Romania, Russia, and Hungary, communities that even then seemed threatened--not by destruction and extermination, which no one foresaw, but by change. Using a hidden camera and under difficult circumstances, Vishniac was able to take over sixteen thousand photographs; most were left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. With the publication of Children of a Vanished World , seventy of those photographs are available, thirty-six for the first time. The book is devoted to a subject Vishniac especially loved, and one whose mystery and spontaneity he captured with particular poignancy: children. Selected and edited by the photographer's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, and translator and coeditor Miriam Hartman Flacks, these images show children playing, children studying, children in the midst of a world that was about to disappear. They capture the daily life of their subjects, at once ordinary and extraordinary. The photographs are accompanied by a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games in both Yiddish and English translation. Thanks to Vishniac's visual artistry and the editors' choice of traditional Yiddish verses, a part of this wonderful culture can be preserved for future generations. Earlier books of Roman Vishniac's photographs include To Give Them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac (1995), A Vanished World (1983), and Polish Jews (1947). A major exhibition titled "Children of a Vanished World: Photographs byRoman Vishniac" is scheduled at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The show will open to the public on March 7 and run through June 4, 2000.

The realities of Jewish life in eastern Europe that concerned the average Jew meant the way their children grew up, the way they studied, how they married, and all the subsequent stages of the life cycle-including the problems of divorce, remarriage, and elderly parents. The family and the community were in a very real sense the core institutions of east European Jewish society. These realities were always dynamic and evolving but in the nineteenth century, the pace of change in almost every area of life was exceptionally rapid. This collection of essays deals with these social realities objectively and analytically. Some of the essays presented here are classics that have been widely acclaimed, earning their author a well-deserved reputation for authoritative research; all have been comprehensively revised for this book. They avoid both sentimental descriptions and judgmental attitudes. The result is a picture that is far from the stereotyped view of the past that is common today, but a more honest and more comprehensive one. Topics covered in the studies on education consider the learning experiences of both males and females of different ages. They also deal with and distinguish between study among the well off and learned (not surprisingly, the two went together) and study among the poorer masses. A number of essays are devoted to aspects of educating the elite. Here too, the reconstruction of the realities of the past, as opposed to the stereotypical popular image, reveals the remarkable creativity of what is often mistakenly considered a highly conservative element of society. Several essays deal with aspects of marriage, a key element in the life of most Jews. Using both quantitative and qualitative sources, the author has been able to identify and document characteristics of both first and subsequent marriages and to highlight and explain trends that have hitherto been misunderstood. The problem of aged parents and the changing nature of the nuclear family is also considered. The attempt to understand the rabbinate in its social and historical context is no less revealing then the studies in other areas. The realities of rabbinical life--the problems of getting appointments, job security and insecurity, changing responsibilities and the difficulties of dealing with fragmented and modernizing communities--are presented in a way that explains rabbinic behavior and the complex relations between communities, ideologies, and modernization. These essays look at the past through the prism of the lives of ordinary people, with results that are sometimes surprising but always stimulating. The topics they treat are varied, but the concern to explain what lay behind the visible reality is common to all of them.

Children of the Rainbow tackles a subject rarely mentioned, the plight of Central and East European Gypsies in the shadow of the Holocaust. Through an absorbing combination of fact, fiction and mythology, Farhi tells the story of Branko, a Roma Gypsy baby born in the Auschwitz concentration camp, who receives the prophecy that he will be his people's saviour. Named Branko, after an inmate who has been compiling the Gypsy Bible, he is smuggled out of the compound and entrusted to a Red Cross official. Some thirty years later, on the death of his adoptive father, Branko sets out to remould his identity: he witnesses first-hand the relentless persecution of the Roma and comes to hear of the Gypsy Bible that his namesake had miraculously reclaimed from the collective memory of the Roma in Auschwitz. Hidden and awaiting discovery, the powerful book prophesies Branco's leadership, under which the gypsies will be reunited and led to Romanestan, their mysterious homeland.

More than 50 years ago, as World War II and the Nazi assault on Europe ended, approximately 25,000 Jews, entire families in some instances, walked out of the forests of Poland, Belorussia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. For four years, these men, women and children had miraculously survived, eluding Nazi hunts and Soviets, Poles and Ukrainians who often killed first and asked questions later. Fugitives of the Forest is the popular history of these heroic Jewish partisans, using their own testimonies and interviews. Allan Levine, in a gripping narrative, sheds light on one of the darkest times in the history of civilisation.

Presents an inventory of the images of the Jew, mainly in Romanian culture. Focuses on popular beliefs, while illustrating ties with more elite political imagery. Groups anti-Jewish stereotypes into various "portraits": physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magic, and religious. Some physical images of the Jew, like red hair and "Jewish" freckles were associated with the devil. Another negative feature, one not exclusive to Romanian folk culture, was a belief in the existence of an unplesant Jewish smell considered to be a punishment for deicide that could be, alleviated only by the blood of Christians. Occupational stereotypes often related to materialism and dishonesty, contrasting the Jewish tradesman with the nature connected Romanian peasant. Jewish tavern-keepers were also associated with the devil. Characteristics that could be viewed as positive, like intelligence, were often linked to negative Jewish stereotypes, like craftiness. Some anti-Jewish stereotypes derived from early Christian views, e.g. of the Jews as blind to the "truths" of Christianity. Other images, like that of the Jew as a rain-maker, reflect traditional East European peasant views. An apparently positive image may have negative connotations, e.g. the positive omen of meeting a Jew at the beginning of a trip is based on the idea of the Jew as a "lightning-rod" for attracting the devil away from Christians. The religious portrait combines traditional universal Christian images of the Jew as deicide with local legends of the Jews as responsible for martyring a Christian saint and defacing a revered local icon. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were accused of killing Christian children. Some of these negative stereotypes were also associated with the Gypsies or other minorities.