A Small Town in Ukraine
By Bernard Wasserstein
Allen Lane, £25

My Disappearing Uncle
By Kathy Henderson
The History Press, £20


Have you ever heard of Krakowiec? It is a tiny town on the western edge of modern Ukraine, a region that has recently been witnessing a massive evacuation of terrified Ukrainians across the border into the arms of their Polish neighbours.

Bernard Wasserstein, widely respected for his writings on Jewish history, has held academic posts on both sides of the Atlantic and his latest book is, at root, a meticulously researched study of the hometown and wider environment of his Jewish ancestors.

Much of its earlier history, he emphasises, has been characterised by inhumane brutality from all sides, including recurrent warfare between Poles and Ukrainians.

Kathy Henderson is best known for her award-winning children’s books, her poetry, song collections and for a rare capacity to illustrate her publications.

My Disappearing Uncle By Kathy Henderson

The sheer versatility of her talents and interests, the irresistibly engaging style of her writing and her investigation into the story of her “Disappearing Uncle” and the legacy of her wider family background all help provide a gripping parallel to the story told by Wasserstein.

Both books are richly illustrated and tell of an extended family history that their respective authors felt compelled to undertake.

And there is a deep complementarity between them. Wasserstein focuses primarily on the “Ostjuden” of what are now Ukraine and Poland, and Henderson further westwards on what becomes the Austro-Hungarian empire. In both we read of the attempts of Jews over the course of time to move into, across and ultimately away from what was long their geographical centre of gravity.

Wasserstein leads us through what we know of Polish history (and that of its Jews) in the 17th and 18th centuries, encountering on the way such figures as Jan Sobieski, the king who in 1683 defeated the Ottoman Turks as they besieged Vienna.

In 1706, Russia’s Peter the Great resided briefly at Jaworów just east of Krakoviec, which in Nazi times became a ghetto-cum-concentration camp for the region’s Jews.

Into the 19th century and we meet Wasserstein’s traditionally frum great-grandparents and their son Bernhard (aka “Berl”) who was born in Krakoviec in 1898.

Berl and his wife went on to live in inter-war Berlin until October 1938 when they were suddenly expelled by the Nazi authorities, returning to Krakowiec whence they were later transported to nearby Jaworów and never heard of again.

Meanwhile, their son Abraham “Addi”, our author’s father), back in Berlin, managed to take temporary refuge in Italy, thence to Turkey and on to Palestine where he met and married his Hungarian-born wife Maca (Margaret).

After the War, the couple moved to Britain where Bernard Wasserstein was born in 1948. His close contemporary Kathy Henderson tells us about the Vienna-based Schindler and Schey families, linked as they were by her grandmother “Mutti”, the actress Anny Schindler who was a cousin of Mahler’s wife Alma.

Mutti came to be addressed as “Frau Baronin” on account of her marriage to Baron Friedrich Schey von Koromla (or “Fritz”) who later went off to spend much of his life in Argentina.

Mutti eventually moved to England with her three children, including Kathy’s mother Inge and her uncle Clemens who, interned by the British in 1940 as an enemy alien, soon “disappeared”, having been transported to Canada.

Henderson’s narrative, like Wasserstein’s, includes a wide range of memorable personalities as we move into and then beyond the Vienna of Freud, Mahler and Klimt.

“I liked Klimt a lot,” a surviving old friend of grandma Mutti once told Kathy. “He wanted to paint me but my parents wouldn’t let me pose for him.”

And Kathy recalls going on walks with her mother Inge across Hampstead Heath, or further where they’d be greeted by a greying old lady who turned out to be a niece of Mutti and Inge’s godmother: the refugee painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczsky.

Only after the fall of the USSR and the new accessibility of Mitteleuropa did our two authors investigate their respective family histories, each visiting not only a variety of archive collections but also many of the dots on the map from which so much had emanated.

The results introduce us to a host of colourful characters, to political and religious practices and prejudices and to countless wars and attempts at peace. In effect, to centuries of turbulent, superbly narrated history that, looking back, led to the lives and times of so many of us today.