I Rest My Case

by Verstandig, Mark

Overview

Mark Verstandig's compelling epic spans pre-Holocaust Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and its post-war reformation in Australia. His personal story interweaves the vast forces of politics and history with intimate details of the shtetl-from the pre-war intricacies of Galician society and the textures of a traditional Jewish religious education, to the agonizing contradictions of Polish-Jewish relations and the complexities of post-war Jewish politics. His account of the displaced persons camps where 'transit Jews' awaited their chance to emigrate is a significant contribution to a little-known aspect of post-war history. With his gift for observation and his acute powers of analysis, Mark Verstandig has achieved the rare feat of telling the story of his people through its own history. Part autobiography, part Holocaust literature, part sociological analysis, I Rest My Case is a fine achievement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780522863284
Publisher:	Melbourne University Publishing
Publication date:	04/01/2013
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	340
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Mark Verstandig lives in Melbourne, where he has always been active in community affairs and, now in his eighties, is still a well-known Yiddish broadcaster, public speaker and journalist. I Rest My Case was translated from Yiddish by his daughter Felicity Verstandig

Table of Contents

Maps of Poland
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1. Antecedents
2. My father, the shtadlan
3. The Depression years
4. A cheder education
5. The Melec gymnasium
6. Jewish student life in Cracow
7. A small-town legal practice
8. Inter-war Poland
9. Flight to the east
10. On the Soviet side
11. False security
12. Hazards of legal practice
13. The Melec Aktion
14. Escape to Polaniec
15. The net tightens
16. On the run
17. We go into hiding
18. Partisan murders
19. The Russians arrive
20. August 1944
21. Back at work
22. Restitution and retribution
23. Kielce: the breaking-point
24. DPs in Germany
25. The Polish inheritance
26. The German black market
27. The rag trade
Postscript: our lucky country

Glossary
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A major work of sociological and historical signifigance...transcends the academic to become memorable journalism and literature..." --Sam Lipski, Jewish News



"Lipski's comparisons with Sholem Aleichem, the brothers Singer, and, even, the Russians Gogol, Gorky and Isaac Babel aren't all that fanciful..." --Max Teichmann, Eureka Street



"...a very precise (and morbidly exciting) account of what wartime pressures made of those he knew. . . a tapestry of those minute personal choices, acts of complicity or resistance, which either pave the way to Aushwitz--and later to Srebrenica--or away from them. . ." --Peter Christoff, Australian Book Review

"[T]he lost world of Polish Jewry has found a wry, faithful and utterly unsentimental chronicler." --Robert Manne, Herald Sun

From the Publisher