A riveting account of a forgotten holocaust: the slaughter of over one hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Jeffrey Veidlinger is a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan and the director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. His books, which include The Moscow State Yiddish Theater and In the Shadow of the Shtetl, have won a National Jewish Book Award, the Barnard Hewitt Award for Theatre Scholarship, two Canadian Jewish Book Awards, and the J. I. Segal Award. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Veidlinger’s book ranks alongside Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands in
forcing our eyes eastwards. It is deeply researched and masterfully
written, with a cool restraint that only intensifies its power. It
reminded me of Faulkner’s line that “the past is never dead. It’s
not even past.”
*Sunday Telegraph*
[An] exhaustive, clearly written, deeply researched story of events
in a time and place most of us know nearly nothing about - the
pogroms of 1918-21 in Ukraine and Poland . . . [an] imortant and
scholalry book.
*The Times*
We now know much more about the pogroms of 1918–21 because of
Veidlinger’s painstaking research . . . he has succeeded in shining
a bright scholarly light on a much less well-known attempt to
exterminate European Jews two decades before the Holocaust. In its
thoroughness and controlled passion, In the Midst of Civilized
Europe is descriptive history at its best.
*Literary Review*
Superbly researched . . . Jeffrey Veidlinger askes big historical
questions that will change our understanding of the relation
between pogroms immediately after the First World War and the
Holocaust, barely twenty years later.
*TLS*
Revelatory . . . Veidlinger’s crisp prose and extensive research
makes the scale of the tragedy immediate and devastating. This is a
vital addition to understanding how the Holocaust happened.
*Publishers Weekly*
Chilling . . . unequivocal . . . A vital history that draws a
direct line from Eastern European antisemitic violence to the
Holocaust.
*Kirkus Reviews*
The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between
local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of
that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research,
clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book.
As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the
reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can
do.
*Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands*
This brilliant account of the bloody pogroms, which were
perpetrated in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, represents an
important advance on a neglected subject, and is more than welcome.
The author's thesis on links to subsequent events gives serious
food for thought.
*Norman Davies, author of God's Playground, Europe: A
History and Vanished Kingdoms*
A work of singular importance: a meticulous, original and deeply
affecting historical account, one that provides new insights into
the conditions that catalyzed mass-murder on an industrial
scale.
*East West Street*
In this extraordinary work Veidlinger disinters a largely forgotten
history of tragic and portentous dimensions. Compelling and
well-written, the book will find a broad audience. This is a story
that needs to be told.
**
In this deeply learned but highly readable book, Veidlinger
demonstrates how the all-but-forgotten pogroms in the collapsing
Russian Empire in 1918–21 set precedents for the horrors that were
to follow just two decades later.
**
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