2012 — On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the eve of its destruction. [This] original and provocative book presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught.In the 1930s, as Europe spiraled toward the Second World War, the continent's Jews faced an existential crisis. The harsh realities of the age--anti-Semitic persecution, economic discrimination, and an ominous climate of violence--devastated Jewish communities and shattered the lives of individuals....Demographic collapse, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution were all taking their toll. The problem was not just Nazism: In the summer of 1939 more Jews were behind barbed wire outside the Third Reich than within it, and not only in police states but even in the liberal democracies of the West...Unlike most previous accounts it focuses not on the anti-Semites but on the Jews... The geographical range also is vast: from Vilna (the "Jerusalem of the North") to Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris, from the Judeo-Espagnol-speaking stevedores of Salonica to the Yiddish-language collective farms of Soviet Ukraine and Crimea. ... Based on comprehensive research, rendered with compassion and empathy, and brought alive by telling anecdotes and dry wit, .... a vivid and enlightening picture of the European Jews in their final hour.551p. plates bibliography, index. Book
