Become a Member
Books

The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide To The Perished City

Monumental record of devastating loss

December 9, 2009 17:04
Rubinstajn, \"jester of the ghetto\"

By

Ben Barkow,

Ben Barkow

2 min read

By Barbara Engelking & Jacek Leociak
Yale University Press £40

The devil, they say, is in the detail. This extraordinary book bears out the epithet. Its 906 pages form a vastly detailed portrait of Jews in the ghetto, struggling for survival under the radical evil of Nazi occupation. It is a book displaying deep scholarship, but also intense emotion.

The Warsaw Ghetto is a plain and indisputable title. The subtitle, A Guide to the Perished City, is more suggestive and poetic. The ghetto was not, after all, a city. It was a small — hideously small, given how many were crammed into it — part of the city. It didn’t so much perish as get murdered, yet that epithet — “perished city”— is richly evocative of a phenomenon that is both haunting and haunted.

The book’s narrative is similarly dualistic: part scholarship, part personal response. The intellectual angle of approach derives from the disciplines of psychology, history and literary criticism.