The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944

This authoritative, stunningly edited edition of Kruk's acclaimed journals, news postings and poems of life and death in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna and later in a labor camp in Estonia is as major addition to Holocaust literature and Jewish history. In 1961 a Yiddish edition of the Vilna diaries was published. This larger new edition has been painstakingly assembled from those diaries and other documents and writings by Kruk that were widely scattered and only found since the 1961 edition; Harshav has also added a wealth of new footnotes. The potency and the power of Kruk's chronicle resides in its scrupulous detailing of everyday ghetto life-what people ate and read, the self-imposed rules for how Jewish women dressed, Jewish collaborators, Christian resistance to camps and deportations, news reports from the ghetto newspaper-while consistently placing it in a broader political and social context based on reports that filter into the ghetto from the outside. Because Vilna was a center of Jewish learning and culture-it is where the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (now in New York) was founded and was the site of some of Europe's most vital Jewish libraries and schools-Kruk's elaborate delineation of the destruction of this world takes on an almost mythic quality. This lost culture resonates throughout this mesmerizing and heartbreaking book. Photos. (Sept.)