Strangers in Their Own Land: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today

Rating:
Summary: A must-read!
Review: At the time this book was published in 1987, there were about 35,000 Jews in Germany, most of whom were children of Holocaust survivors. (Today, there are also quite a few Eastern European Jews who came after the Berlin Wall came down). Later, when I myself visited Germany in 1997, I had many conversations similar to those in this book.

"I'm proud to live with my family in Germany as a religious Jew," writes one contributor. "My bags are always packed," writes another. Between these two extremes of comfort and fear, there's a wide spectrum of feelings about what it is like to be a Jew in Central Europe today. These are 14 testimonials from German Jews, not as the public would like to see them, but how they feel in private, in the depths of their hearts and souls. A troubling, thought-provokng book that is hard to read, but impossible to put down.