Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory by Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer (review)

The central ambition of this remarkable book is “to illuminate the distinct culture of the city of Czernowitz and its Jewish inhabitants during the Habsburg years before the outbreak of the First World War and the afterlife of that urbane cultural ideal over subsequent decades” (xvi). The book also seeks to shed light on the specificity of the Holocaust in Romania and the ambivalence of Jewish refugees in regard to the Soviet Union while underscoring the social and ideological tensions within the evolving Jewish community. That it achieves these goals is abundantly clear. Yet what strikes me as most noteworthy about Ghosts of Home is how it does so.

The structure of the book reflects four journeys to and around Czernowitz undertaken by the authors between 1998 and 2008. In Part One, Hirsch and Spitzer convey, through an engaging narrative based on a wide array of sources, the fundamental features of the ideal in question. Above all, as “the site of encounters between languages (German, Yiddish, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian) and cultures (Romanians, Austrians, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Hutsuls, Poles, Russians)” (140), Czernowitz (subsequently Cernăuṭi as a part of Romania, Chernovtsy under Soviet rule, and Chernivtsi in present-day Ukraine) conjures an image of vibrant cosmopolitanism all the more remarkable for the city’s geographical isolation within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a strategic outpost during the Habsburg years, however, and thanks in large part to ever greater emancipatory reforms, Czernowitz is also indissociably linked to the extraordinary flourishing of its large Jewish community in every sphere of urban life—in education and the professions no less than in trade, politics, and culture. At the same time, the authors wisely qualify the ideal, or perhaps the idea, of Czernowitz by acknowledging the tensions that were bound to arise, within this community or in its relation to the Jews of the Bukowina (the surrounding region), between the very strong assimilationist inclination and the resistance of orthodoxy, and by pointing to the persistence and even ominous growth of a racism that targeted all Jews.

Entitled “We Would Not Have Come Without You,” Part One also includes an account of the authors’ first visit to Czernowitz, accompanied by Hirsch’s parents, Carl and Lotte, Jewish Czernowitzers who survived the war and the Holocaust while remaining in the city. This visit was undertaken before the book was conceived but became its inspiration. Standing at a crossroads formerly known as the Springbrunnenplatz, Carl and Lotte tell, in situ, how their decision to turn down one street rather than another spared them from deportation to Transnistria and an almost certain death. The recounting of this decisive moment to Hirsch and Spitzer and the authors’ own rendition of this recounting not only communicate a tangible sense of historical contingency but powerfully convey the afterlife of Czernowitz both in the memory of survivors and in the reception and transmission of their testimony by subsequent generations. Indeed, the importance of Hirsch and Spitzer’s having initiated this journey is underscored by the title just cited, which is taken from Carl and Lotte’s repeated claim that “we would not have come without you.”

Part Two, “The Darker Side,” pursues in its framing chapters the story, begun in Chapter Five of Part One, of the Soviet occupation of Czernowitz in 1940–41 and again in 1944. These chapters go a long way toward elucidating the difficulty, for Jews, of “reading” and responding to an occupying power that many initially saw as their liberator but that, from the spring of 1944 onward, seemed to offer little more than a continuation of oppression. As its title suggests, however, Part Two also has much to do with fascist anti-Semitic persecution between the Soviet occupations. The account of Hirsch and Spitzer’s second trip to the area, made in 2000 and devoted largely to research for the book, focuses attention on the concentration camp in the Transnistrian town of...