A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe

This deeply engrossing history, expertly crafted by Kaufman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (Broken Alliance: Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America), traces the lives of five Holocaust survivors who continued to live in Eastern Europe after WWII. Four of the survivors were Jewish and, in addition to being hunted by Nazis during the war, they and their children endured intermittent waves of postwar anti-Semitism. Kaufman's research took him to Berlin, where in the East, Klaus Gysi became a powerful member of the Communist government, while Greek refugee Estrongo Nachama served as cantor for West Berlin's Jews. The author also details the life of Tamas Raj, a dissident Hungarian rabbi, Sylvia Wittman, imprisoned as a ""Zionist agent"" in 1950s Czechoslovakia, and Barbara Asendrych, daughter of a Polish Catholic family who learns that her biological mother was Jewish. Kaufman predicts that the collapse of Eastern Europe's Communist governments will help the resurgence of Judaism in that part of the world. (Jan.)