cover image Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland

Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland

Malgorzata Niezabitowska, Magorzata Niezabitowska. Friendly Press, $35 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-914919-05-6

Offering a rare glimpse of Polish-Jewish daily life, family and religious celebrations, cultural and community events, Niezabitowska, a Polish journalist, tries to ""overcome my own ignorance as well as my often unconscious presuppositions and stereotypes,'' and for the most part succeeds in penetrating a foreign world. The tragedy of Polish Jewrythe population decreased from the three and a half million of preWorld War II to 5000, the majority elderly, in 1980is made painfully palpable through their reminiscences recorded here and through Tomaszewski's color photographs: of a tailor who laments his daughter's interfaith marriage, a brushmaker who has been baptized yet leads the synagogue prayers, the first Warsaw child to celebrate a bar mitzvah in 30 years. A community leader, without self-pity, tells American tourists to ``bring us youth, joy, life . . . That is what we really miss.'' First serial to National Geographic; B'nai B'rith Jewish Book Club main selection; author tour. (September 30)