264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie.

A biography of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist includes an account of the discovery of his last artworks--murals painted on the walls of a villa occuppied by a Nazi officer--sixty years after his death and the complicated political dispute over the ownership of the murals.

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.

"The retrospective of the work of Felix Nussbaum in the Kulturgeschichtliches Museum Osnabruck in 1990 and the catalogue, Felix Nussbaum Are Defamed - Art in Exile - Art in Resistance, fully established Nussbaum's artistic rank and his position in the art of the twentieth century. The representative collection of his most important works, on permanent display in the upper gallery of the Kulturgeschichtliches Museum in Osnabruck, is a constant witness to this." "Nussbaum's art reflects the course of the first half of this century like that of no other painter - the tranquil life in the provinces, the rapid tempo of life in the capital Berlin, emigration, the camp, war and the conquest of Europe by Nazi Germany, then the exclusion of the Jewish people by a policy of racism, life underground and in hiding, and finally the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Above all, his last paintings, an eye witness account of the Holocaust to which he himself eventually fell victim, are unique in art." "The catalogue for the 1990 exhibition has become a standard work on Felix Nussbaum and on resistance in art, stimulating a reconsideration of this away from the clichees of Agitprop." "Hence, The Overlook Press is issuing a new and fully revised edition of the book. It includes paintings by Felix Nussbaum that have come to light in the last five years, among them the major group of works that were left behind in Amsterdam when his parents were arrested. All the new facts that have emerged on Nussbaum's life and the new details that have become known on his artistic contacts have been taken into account, and the interpretation of many individual paintings has been given greater depth or corrected in accordance with the latest state of research. The many comparisons with works by other European artists should help to widen understanding of the analysis of Nussbaum's works in art history."--BOOK JACKET.