Eliyana R. Adler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia, winner of the Heldt Prize, and coeditor of Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades.
[A] groundbreaking new book chronicling the fate of the
quarter-million or so Polish Jews who evaded Hitler only to wind up
in the hands of Stalin.
*New York Review of Books*
It is a neglected area of scholarship, but in this
thoroughly-researched book, she fills that yawning gap
admirably.
*Times of Israel*
Adler…has amassed a treasure trove of archival material augmented
by an impressive collection of immigrant memoirs to tell this
compelling social history.
*Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews*
This is an innovative, intellectually sophisticated, yet readily
accessible, humane, and handsomely produced book. It casts
Polish-Jewish relations with the Soviet wartime authorities in a
more positive light than totalitarianism theorists might have
predicted.
*Holocaust and Genocide Studies*
This pathbreaking monograph focuses on the experiences of Polish
Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union during the Second World
War…Contributes to a growing (and welcome) interest in the
subject.
*Russian Review*
Richly researched and evocatively written…Adler excavates a
neglected history of the largest group of Eastern European Jews,
perhaps a quarter million, to emerge alive from the catastrophe of
the Shoah. At the same time, she deftly traces and analyzes the
conditions of its marginalization and the long-standing
consequences of that inattention for memory and memorialization as
well as historiography.
*Association for Jewish Studies Review*
One of the most important texts of recent years that recovers the
story of Polish Jewish survival in the Soviet Union to successfully
integrate it into the study of Polish Jewish history, the
Holocaust, and the Great Patriotic War…Adler has offered us a
brilliant book, written with unmatched compassion.
*H-Net Reviews*
This intriguing, well-written social history is the most detailed
treatment to date in English of the Polish Jews who spent the war
years in the USSR, either because they fled the Germans or because
they were arrested and deported. One of the book’s major
achievements is Adler’s mastery of an impressive array of personal
interviews and testimonies from various archives in Poland, the
United States, Israel, and elsewhere.
*Samuel D. Kassow, Trinity College*
An ambitious and deeply researched book about the relatively
unknown Polish Jewish refugees who spent some or all of World War
II in Soviet territory. Adler is scrupulously fair in assessing the
Soviet Union’s role in ‘saving’ these refugees, accurate about what
we know and cannot know about Stalin’s intentions, and sensitive to
the nuances of Polish antisemitism and anticommunism. This
sophisticated, elegantly written work will expand the boundaries of
Holocaust studies.
*Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University*
The largest group left after the Holocaust of interwar Europe’s
biggest Jewish community survived the Nazi era in the eastern
reaches of the Soviet Union. This important, extensively researched
book documents the experiences of this important segment of Polish
Jewry during the Second World War.
*David Engel, New York University*
Lovingly written and meticulously researched, Survival on the
Margins plumbs a history that scholars only sketched before. A
landmark study, it brings a singularly significant chapter of the
Holocaust into sharp focus. Situating Polish Jewish refugees in the
broad sweep of the wartime Soviet Union, Adler deftly negotiates
both the large political picture and the immediate social
environment, while never losing sight of the individuals whose
lives were shaped by their flight east.
*Debórah Dwork, Clark University*
A unique compendium of knowledge for researchers in the social
sciences and humanities, as well as for readers interested in the
social history of pain and determination of a group whose memory
the author has managed to restore and thus make the history of
World War II and the Holocaust more complete.
*Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte*
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