By Peter Cullman
History of the Jews of this town (now Trzcianka, Poland).
History of the Jewish Community of Schönlanke : 1736–1940
After six years of meticulous research, a skill further honed since his first book, History of the Jewish Community of Schneidemühl: 1641 to the Holocaust (Avotaynu, 2006), Peter Simonstein Cullman in this 480-page opus has gone beyond the standard set in the genre of contemporary yizkor books (Holocaust memorial books). He has created a monograph that encapsulates more than the 200-year history of the Jewish community of Schönlanke (today Trzcianka, Poland).
The book’s narrative commences with an illustration of Jewish existence in German lands in the age of Charlemagne, the birth of the Polish nation and the impact of geopolitical upheavals on Jewish life, while extraordinary heights of Jewish culture were reached in 16th century Poland. The reader is led to witness the evolution of the community’s religious life under Prussia’s pedantic rule in tandem with the Jewish Enlightenment. A portrait of Jews in war and peace, an introduction to the community’s social fibre and its venerable rabbis is followed by an analysis of a history-making religious conversion of one of this community’s members.
Extensive annotated community registers of the early 1800s may allow for genealogical research by linking the ancestries of early families to the near present.
The book concludes with the chapter Lo tishkach (‘Do not forget’).
This exceptionally detailed biographical documentation of the lives and fates of the community’s hundreds of victims and survivors of the Holocaust serves as a memoir of a once flourishing Jewish community that ceased to exist in 1940.
7" x 10" 480 pp. hardcover $56.00