RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- 20 Years Ago Today....

 Prague -- early 1990s. A sausage stand under the entrance to a disused synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, on looking back to the Way It Was before the Wall came down....

A sea change in 20 years

By Ruth Ellen Gruber· November 10, 2009

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN

ROME (JTA) -- The English author L.P. Hartley once wrote that "The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there."

That's how I feel whenever I look back at the way that the world -- in particular, the Jewish world in Central and Eastern Europe -- worked before the collapse of communism 20 years ago.

The changes triggered when the Berlin Wall came down have, of course, produced a host of new and complex challenges that Jews in Europe have had to confront.

But as Robert Djerassi, a leader of the Bulgarian Jewish community, put it recently, "When I think back to Socialist days, even everyday experiences sound so improbable and grotesque that it's hard sometimes to convince people who didn't live through them that they actually took place."

I lived and worked as a journalist in communist countries from the late 1970s onward, first as a correspondent for United Press International and then as an independent reporter, for JTA and others, as well as the author of several books on the region.

It was in the late 1980s that I began dedicating much of my writing to Jewish subjects, just as communism was collapsing and new democratic freedoms allowed Jews to reassert and reclaim their identity and forge a new beginning in what before the Holocaust had been Europe's Jewish heartland.

Under communism in most countries in the region, the practice of Judaism and the expression of Jewishness were semi-clandestine, almost secret, almost taboo.

Leaders of the remnant Jewish communities in these countries were beholden to the regime and generally toed the party line. Less than a year after the fall of communism, the rabbi in Prague was forced to resign after admitting that he had been a police informer under the communists.

All communist states except Romania had broken ties with Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. And in most countries Jewish practice and education, even the study of Hebrew, was strictly limited or even barred.

In Prague, for example, the scholarly publication of what was then the State Jewish Museum was published in English and French and other languages -- but not in Czech, in order to limit access by local people.

And many Jews I interviewed were unwilling to speak to me on the record, even on a subject such as the restoration of a monument to victims of the Holocaust.

"We had to get authorization from the authorities to speak with foreign visitors, and then afterward we had to write out reports on our conversations, whether it be with visiting scholars, journalists or whatever," a Prague Jewish museum curator told me in 1990. "It was the pressure of a totalitarian regime."

In Warsaw in the early 1980s, I was part of a group called the Jewish Flying University that consisted of young Jews and non-Jews who tried to teach themselves -- on their own -- Jewish ritual, tradition, history and culture. The group "flew" from apartment to apartment for meetings.

Western Jews like myself were conduits to the outside world, despite the limits of our knowledge.

"You're a real Jew," they told me, even though I don't keep kosher, go to services much or speak Hebrew. "You've known all your life that you are Jewish."

November 1989 saw a climax of change in Eastern Europe that had been coming for months.

Already that summer a negotiated settlement in Poland had led to free elections. And in September, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had officially returned to Hungary after 36 years, and Hungary and Israel had resumed formal diplomatic relations.

Nov. 12 of that year found me in Prague sitting with a small group of eager yet anxious Jews in the top floor function room of the historic Jewish Town Hall. The Berlin Wall had come down three days earlier, but the Velvet Revolution that ousted the communist regime in Prague was still five days away.

We were there to meet with Edgar Bronfman, then president of the World Jewish Congress, who was making his first official visit to the country.

I saw fear and hope -- and also excitement -- on people's faces.

"The winds of freedom are blowing across the world like a gale," Bronfman declared. "I don't like to use the word 'democracy,' but prefer to say that there is a new era dawning on everyone that people won't be governed without their consent."

He went on, "It is important that the Jewish people in Eastern Europe are beginning to feel closer together. It is heartbreakingly sad that there are so few Jews left, [but] the Jewish world will go from strength to strength. We have a mission -- to teach others the way of the Lord."

Bronfman concluded: "Freedom is blowing, blowing for all of us."

It was an emotional moment at the cusp of the unknown: If the past is a foreign country, so is the future.

Read story at JTA.org

Tablet Magazine -- (Candle)sticks on Stone

Radauti. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Tablet Magazine has published my article on my project, (Candle)sticks on Stone, exploring the representation of women in Jewish tombstone art through the depiction of candles. There is a photo slide show with the article.

STICKS AND STONES

BY RUTH ELLEN GRUBER, September 30, 2009

It was the first week in September, and in cowboy boots and jeans, camera slung over my shoulder, I crunched through the springy thick tangle of undergrowth that carpets the old Jewish cemetery in Radauti, a market town in the far north of Romania, near the Ukrainian border. Around me stretched the crowded, ragged rows of tilted tombstones: gray and mossy green, some still bearing remnants of the blue and black and red painted decoration that once adorned the exquisite, ornate carving on their faces.

Radauti is the town from which my father’s parents emigrated to the United States before World War I, but this, for me, was not supposed to be a roots trip. Nor was I consciously fulfilling the tradition of visiting the tombs of my ancestors around the time of the High Holidays.

I was here this time to work on a project called (Candle)sticks on Stone, an exploration of the varied and evocative ways that women are represented in Jewish tombstone art through depictions of Shabbat candles, which I hope eventually to turn into a book.

The project, which is supported in part by a Jewish women’s studies grant from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, includes making a photographic documentation of Jewish women’s tombstones in Radauti and in several other nearby towns, including Siret, Botosani, and Gura Humorului. The older tombstones in these and other Jewish cemeteries in parts of today’s Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and Poland form an astonishing collection of ornate sculptural design. Many cemeteries have disappeared; in many others the stones are eroded and crumbling. But those that remain comprise wonderful examples of vivid local stone-carving that fuse local folk art and Jewish iconography.

The wide range of carved symbols represent names, professions, personal attributes, or family lineage. There are lions, birds, stags, bears, snakes, and imaginary beasts; there are flowers, grapevines, garlands, and geometric patterns; there are the pitchers of the Levites, the crown of the Torah, and the hands of the Cohanim raised in blessing; and there are powerful symbols of death: the hand of God plucking a flower or breaking off a branch from the Tree of Life.

Here and elsewhere, candles and candlesticks are common symbols on Jewish women’s tombs, because lighting the Sabbath candles is one of the three so-called “women’s commandments” carried out by female Jews—and the only one easily represented in visual terms. (The others include observing the laws of menstrual purity, or Niddah, and that of Challah, or burning a piece of dough when making bread.)

Many are simple, schematic silhouettes, but here in the heart of Eastern Europe they also take on extravagant, elegant forms: carved candlesticks braided like loaves of challah; candlesticks that look like leafy plants, candlesticks flanked by grapevines and griffins, candlesticks that look like flowers, candles that are broken to symbolize death. Above them, on many of the tombstones, are the carved hands of women, held up in a pious gesture to bless the flames.

A primary aim of my (Candle)sticks on Stone project is simply to present these carvings as examples of art. The older stones, from the 18th and early 19th century in particular, are unique examples of sculptural skill and imaginative design: it is often possible to discern the hand of individual, if now anonymous, Jewish stone masons or their workshops. And while later stones, often carved according to stenciled templates, present a more uniform appearance, their style and format still varies greatly from town to town.

Another aim is more reflective. As a Jewish woman who has almost never lit the Shabbat candles in my home, I also cannot fail to consider what this representation means. Candlesticks on stone are a formalized shorthand for “Jewishness” and “gender.” But they also spell tradition.

Read Full Article and See Slideshow

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Home for the Holidays

Photo (c) Doru Losneanu

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column details my trip to Romania in September. With three of my cousins, we dabbled in family history and, as the cliche goes, walked in the footsteps of our ancestors.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Discovering an ancestor's footsteps

By Ruth Ellen Gruber, Oct. 1, 2009

RADAUTI, Romania (JTA) -- It's the custom in Judaism to visit the graves of family members around the High Holidays.

This year I went a step further and walked in the footsteps of my ancestors.

My father's parents, who immigrated to the United States before World War I, were born near the market town of Radauti in the Bucovina region of northern Romania.

This is where I went a couple of weeks before Rosh Hashanah. It was my fourth trip to Radauti, which when my grandparents lived there was one of the easternmost towns in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My first visit there was more than 30 years ago, in the freezing December of 1978. I was a correspondent for United Press International and was accompanying Romania's then-chief rabbi, Moses Rosen, on his annual Chanukah tour to far-flung remnant communities throughout the country.

I recall visiting 19 Jewish communities in six days. Elderly people in winter coats and astrakhan hats huddled together in unheated synagogues, and puffs of steam came from the mouths of the Jewish choir from Bucharest that came along with us to perform.

My brother Sam also was on that trip, and he and I took time in Radauti to visit the Jewish cemetery and pick our way through the stones to find the grave of our great-grandmother, Ettel Gruber, who died in 1946 and in whose honor I was given my middle name.

Discovering her grave did not trigger in me any further genealogical impulse, though what we experienced on our trip around Romania that week sowed the seeds of my interest in Jewish heritage.

As far as I knew, Ettel's was the only tomb of my ancestors in that cemetery, and in subsequent visits to Radauti in 1991 and 2006 for other research projects I never thought to seek any other family traces.

My trip to Radauti last month was not supposed to be a roots trip, either. I went there to work on an online photographic project called (Candle)sticks on Stone, about how women are represented on Jewish tombstones through the depiction of Shabbat candles. (See the Web site http://candlesticksonstone.wordpress.com.)

But it was inevitable, I guess, that the ghosts of my long-dead ancestors hovered about, and even somehow intervened, as I carried out my business. After all, though candlesticks are common symbols marking the gravestones of Jewish women, the stone marking my great-grandmother Ettel's tomb in the Radauti cemetery was the first I had seen bearing that image.

This ancestral intervention was particularly evident thanks to the fact that three of my cousins -- Arthur, Hugh and Hugh's son Asher -- had come along with me for part of the journey. The four of us made a pilgrimage to Ettel's grave and took a ritual picture, but otherwise my cousins were not very interested in the other tombstones I was documenting.

Rather, they wanted to find out about our family history and, as the expression goes, to walk where our ancestors had walked.

A friend of a friend in town took us to the city’s registry office and helped us examine yellowing tomes that yielded handwritten dates, names and even street addresses of our forbears.

With the information that turned up and the aid of a couple of friendly policemen, we actually found the house in the nearby village of Vicovu de Sus where Ettel and her husband, our great-grandfather Anschel, had lived when they married in 1880.

Vicovu de Sus, like much of rural northern Romania, is a place where horses and carts are still common forms of transportation. The house we found was an isolated old wooden farmstead with a steep wood-shingled roof at the end of a grassy track at the edge of corn fields. Its only outward concession to modernity seemed to be electric power lines and a satellite dish.

My cousins left Romania after a few days, but I stayed on for a bit to continue work on my project, documenting the Jewish cemeteries in Radauti and several other towns.

But that's not all that I ended up doing.

I can't say that I had been bitten by the genealogy bug, but our session at the town hall, the faded names and dates and notations, and our subsequent discovery of our great-grandparents' house kept me thinking.

Our discoveries about our ancestors' lives had left some some questions that I wanted to try to answer, and I couldn't leave town without at least attempting to resolve them.

One of these loose ends was my discovery that another of my female ancestors -- my grandmother's grandmother, who died in 1904 -- was, like Ettel, buried in the Radauti Jewish cemetery, and that her Hebrew name, and even the plot number and row of her grave, were known.

Armed with this information, I again entered the cemetery and its tilting forest of stones on my last day in town. The cemetery caretaker pointed out the row and left me to push through the undergrowth and scrutinize the Hebrew epitaphs. It was slow going -- my Hebrew is basic at best, the stones were weathered and I had to keep brushing away spiders.

After half an hour or so, there it was: Chaya Dvoira bas Moshe Mordko. She was described in the epitaph as a "modest and honest" woman. Above the words were braided candlesticks on stone, with hands raised in blessing above them and faded traces of the red and green paint that must once have adorned the carving.

In a memoir she wrote by hand when she was well past middle age, my own grandmother recalled how she had lived with her grandparents in Radauti for two years as a young girl, "the happiest two years of my life as a child."

Chaya Dvoira, she wrote, "saw that my clothes were nice and clean, she had meals on time and my hair was always combed nice and neat." They had, she wrote, very little money.

I stood there for awhile in front of this memorial to an ancestor whose existence had never really crossed my mind before this trip.

"I pulled away a strand of stray vines: not sure what, if anything, I actually felt," I wrote that day on my blog. "Glad to be there; cognizant of distance, time, realms; the passing of time and history. Wishing the others could have been there too. Wondering what she looked like!"

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN - A Tale of Two Synagogues

Dohany St. Synagogue, 150 years (young). Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is about the big birthdays of the great synagogues in Budapest and Sofia.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Sept. 7, 2009

BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA) -- This year marks a number of momentous anniversaries: the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II; the 40th anniversary of Woodstock; the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism.

We use anniversaries like these to stop, step back and evaluate not just the event that's being commemorated, but also the passage of time since it happened and the changes wrought with that passage.

In this context, two significant Jewish anniversaries are taking place in September.

The Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest -- the largest synagogue in Europe -- turns 150 years old. And the Great Synagogue in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia turns 100.

OK, they are buildings, not earth-shaking events. But given the impact that some of the other "big" anniversaries had on these synagogues and on what they represent, it's only fitting to highlight their birthdays on the roster of celebrations.

For one, both are magnificent buildings that stand out architecturally as important city landmarks. Partly because of this, both have undergone recent renovations that restored them to opulent glory after decades of postwar neglect.

Both also are flagships of faith, or at least of Jewish identity, and are survivors, too. Witnesses to the pendulum swing of tragedy and triumph that has marked Jewish history in the region, they are potent physical symbols of a proud and enduring Jewish presence.

"The Dohany Synagogue is still the main synagogue of all the Jews of Hungary, the main identity place where we gather, whether we are religious or not," said architectural historian Rudolf Klein, author of the 2008 book about the synagogue, “The Great Synagogue of Budapest.”

As many as 90,000 Jews are believed to live in Budapest, but most are unaffiliated or totally secular.

With its red-and-yellow striped facade, sumptuous decor and two tall spires topped by gilded onion domes, the Dohany is, in fact, one of the most distinctive buildings in the city and was recognized as such from the outset.

Designed by the Viennese architect Ludwig von Forster, it was inaugurated on Sept. 6, 1859. Old engravings show dignitaries in shiny top hats gathered in front of its enormous ark, a domed and gilded structure that itself is the size of a small chapel.

At the time, Jews had not yet achieved full civil rights in Austro-Hungary. Yet the synagogue was the largest house of worship in Budapest and probably the biggest synagogue in the world. One local newspaper called it "a gorgeous piece of architecture."

"I like it as a Jew and as an architect," Klein told JTA. "In both areas it was a breakthrough."

The synagogue's Moorish style launched a genre and set the pattern for hundreds of synagogues built in later years throughout Central Europe and beyond.

The building's monumental scale, its prominent location and its opulent ornamentation, Klein said, epitomized "the optimism of 19th-century Jewry and the tolerant attitude of the gentile world which prevailed in the capital" at the time.

Things, of course, changed later. During World War II the synagogue was used as a concentration camp, where Jews were massed before their deportation to Auschwitz. The graves of Holocaust victims fill the courtyard.

After the war, under communism, the building languished for decades in a sorry state of disrepair. I vividly remember how its ceiling, held up by cables and plastic sheeting, sagged perilously over the congregation that would pack the sanctuary on Yom Kippur simply to make a statement of identity in the face of the regime’s religious suppression.

In 1996, it was officially reopened following a five-year restoration that was financed largely by the newly democratic Hungarian state.

"This building symbolizes the survival and the continuity of the Jewish people," Gusztav Zoltai, chairman of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Communities, declared at the time.

The Sofia synagogue was inaugurated in September 1909, nearly 50 years to the day after the Dohany, and fulfilled a similar role.

Czar Ferdinand himself cut a ribbon to formally inaugurate the building, whose huge dome, slim turrets and lavish, Byzantine-Moorish style fit in with many other grand buildings in downtown Sofia. The prime minister, other government VIPs and local bishops were in the crowd, too, and a procession of rabbis bore Torah scrolls into the sanctuary and placed them in the ark.

"This synagogue will connect us with the past generations and will tell of us to the future ones," the chief rabbi proudly told the congregation 100 years ago. "May God bless this land which we love dearly, for the good of all Bulgarians, in whose sufferings and joys we take an active part."

Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews were saved during World War II by the heroic action of some of the country's leaders, and most of them moved to Israel.

The Great Synagogue, damaged in 1944 by Allied bombing, stood neglected for decades, as Communist authorities unsuccessfully tried to turn it into a concert hall.

Still, recalled Robert Djerassi, one of the chairmen of the synagogue centenary celebrations, "It was an enormous domed building that awed me with its magnificence each time I stepped inside. Such a huge void: fearsome, lofty, dark and mysterious!"

Only a few thousand Jews live in Bulgaria today, but as in Budapest, restoration of the synagogue was a priority after the fall of communism as a public demonstration of both Jewish renewal and Jewish presence in the city.

The first stage of work was completed in 1996, the final one this year, just in time for September's five-day birthday bash.

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov served as honorary chairman of the gala events, echoing the high-profile participation in the synagogue's original dedication a century ago. I'm not sure if I found this moving or ironic, but I'm rather glad he chose to do so.

Read Full Story at JTA

Bielsko-Biala -- My latest Centropa column

Jewish-style restaurant in Bielsko-Biala. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's a link to my latest column for Centropa.org, on Bielsko-Biala, Poland.

BIELSKO BIALA

Published Aug. 20, 2009

Before visiting Bielsko-Biala in southern Poland, I went online to check hotels. One of them, I found, was offering what it called a "Jewish Heritage Package."

Terrific, I thought. I was going to Bielsko-Biala for something else -- an international performance art festival. But I knew the town is rich in Jewish history, and I was looking forward to exploring it in more detail. Then I clicked the link and saw the itinerary.

Read full story

My Article on Silesia, on IHT/NYT web site

My article on the Industrial Heritage Route in Poland's Silesia province, in the International Herald Tribune and New York Times web site.

The monument to Wincenty Pstrowski, a miner and Communist-era labor hero, in Zabrze.Photo 9c0 Ruth Ellen Gruber

A Road Trip Through a Revolution, Mine by Mine and Factory by Factory

By Ruth Ellen Gruber (July 30, 2009)

ZABRZE, POLAND — A bell rings out with a strident clang, and the metal cage begins a slow descent into the earth.

The Nikisowiec workers' housing estate, which was built between 1908 and 1915 for workers at the Wieczorek coal mine.

As I stand inside, helmet on head, shoulder to shoulder with a group of slightly nervous strangers, the refrain of a Merle Travis song keeps running through my head: “It’s dark as a dungeon, damp as the dew/ the dangers are double, the pleasures are few/ where the rain never falls, the sun never shines/ it’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.”

I’m headed down 320 meters, or about 1,050 feet, on a guided tour of the Guido Coal Mine, which was founded in 1855 in Zabrze and closed decades ago.

Today it’s a mining heritage park: its soaring shaft tower the dominant feature of a complex that includes a subterranean museum showcasing more than a century of coal-mining technology — from hand-held picks to huge automated drills that resemble creatures from a sci-fi film — and a research center for industrial tourism.

The mine is a key stop among the 31 sites on the Industrial Monuments Route, which opened three years ago as a kind of tourists’ alternative to the country’s castles and churches. Crossing Silesia Province in the south, the route pays homage to the heritage of the country’s most heavily industrialized region.

This region is essentially Poland’s Rust Belt. The route includes not only mines but foundries, factories, railway stations, power plants, even a wooden radio tower in Gliwice. Some of the facilities are still in operation.

The route also includes museums devoted to specific areas of trade and manufacturing — beer museums at well-known breweries in Zywiec and Tychy; a bread-making museum near Bytom; a press and publishing museum in Pszyczyna; and a textile industry museum in Bielsko Biala. A small Museum of Sanitary Technology, located in a century-old waste-water pumping station in Gliwice, shows the history of sewage treatment technology.

Most sites date to the region’s Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 19th century, when belching smoke from thousands of red-bricked chimneys darkened the Silesian sky, and mines and mills transformed, and blighted, the landscape.

Many of these installations functioned throughout the Communist years. But though Silesia is still heavily industrial, most of its aging plants have either closed or modernized, and much of the old machinery has been scrapped.

The route, in fact, was set up to single out and preserve the more noteworthy of those that remain.

I’ve always been fascinated by the mechanics of heavy industry and the almost sculptural forms of mine towers and factory smokestacks. In the course of a few days I took in many of the listed monuments, visiting some as easy day trips from Krakow and others while staying nearby.

Zabrze, near Katowice, has several listed sites. Before visiting the Guido Mine, I toured an open-air display of shaft machinery at the Krolowa Luiza mining complex. And I admired the monumental sculpture of a weary yet heroic coal miner — the Communist-era workers’ hero Wincenty Pstrowski — that dominates a city park across the street from a museum of mining history.

Two train stations provided a stark contrast. The one in Bielsko Biala, built in 1890 and recently restored, looks like a temple to transportation with elaborate frescoes. The station in Rada Slaska Chebzie, however, stands almost derelict, its red brick, glass and cast-iron facade covered in graffiti.

One site I found particularly striking was the Nikiszowiec Workers’ Housing Estate outside Katowice. One of several such estates included on the route, the Nikiszowiec development was built between 1908-15 for workers at the adjacent — and still functioning — Wieczorek coal mine. It’s a sprawling tract of three-story, red brick apartment buildings, arranged around a large red brick church and connected by courtyards and archways.

Mine workers still live there — I ran into some of them, still in their helmets, coming home after their shift — and the place has a gritty, proletarian air. But there is also evidence of nascent gentrification: window frames are freshly painted in a vivid red, and cafes have begun to appear.

The Industrial Monuments Route is designed as a car route. Some sites, though, can be reached on foot or by public transportation. I drove, but in Bielsko Biala, for example, both the train station and the Textile Industry Museum, with its fascinating collection of looms and mill machinery, were within walking distance of my hotel.

To get around, I used a free illustrated map available in English at tourist information offices. It provides a brief description and photograph of each site, and locates them on general and local maps. (Detailed information is available on the English-language Web site www.silesia-region.pl/szt/en/inf_turyst.html.)

But even with the map, finding my way around was not always easy. Many of the sites are well off the beaten path, and roads, highways and signage, particularly in the heavily congested areas in and around Katowice, can be confusing — I wished more than once that my car had GPS

Read full article on New York Times web site

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Summer Reading and the Holocaust

Holocaust memorial in Budapest, on the bank of the Danube. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column deals with three books by people I know -- The Shanghai Moon, a detective story by S.J. Rozan, The Budapest Protocol, a political thriller by Adam LeBor and The Pages In Between, a memoir by Erin Einhorn. The books are very different, but they deals with how the Holocaust and associated with it, have an impact today.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Summer Reading and the Holocaust

By Ruth Ellen Gruber (July 29, 2009)

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- Summer's here and my recreational reading has included three books by people I actually know.

Each book is quite different from the others -- "The Shanghai Moon" by S.J. Rozan is a detective story; "The Budapest Protocol" by Adam Le Bor is a political thriller; and "The Pages In Between" by Erin Einhorn is a nonfiction personal memoir.

But they all have something in common: They use the Holocaust and the lingering impact of its memory as springboards for narratives that take place in the present. And fiction or nonfiction, all three books are gripping yarns that make readers think, as well as become lost in the story.

"The Shanghai Moon" is the latest in Rozan's award-winning series of mysteries featuring New York-based detectives Lydia Chin and Bill Smith. It hinges on the experiences of the more than 20,000 European Jews who found refuge in Shanghai, China, during the Shoah and on the fate of their looted belongings. The book is the first in her series in which Rozan explores Jewish themes. Like the other two authors, Rozan is Jewish.

"The Shanghai ghetto is a compelling aspect of Jewish and Holocaust history that gets almost no attention," Rozan told me when I asked her what prompted her to write about it. "Once I started the research, I was completely enthralled with these people's stories and thought that whole rich world needed to be brought to light.

"The past never stops reaching into the present,” she said. “In a sense, crime and mystery novels are all about making that clear, about bringing above the surface, as it were, how and when that happens.”

Rozan said she occasionally hears from people who were in the Shanghai ghetto or had family members there.

"They almost never encounter that time and place in fiction, and they're thrilled to see it," she said. "And I'm thrilled when they tell me my picture of it feels right to them."

"The Budapest Protocol" tells quite a different story. Le Bor, a veteran British journalist and author, sets his story in the Hungarian capital, where he lives. But he creates an alternative Budapest, using today's city -- including its former Jewish quarter -- as a backdrop for an imaginary political scene in which Nazi-inspired political forces gain power in a bid to take over Europe.

Le Bor told me he extrapolated from a 1944 U.S. intelligence document an account of a meeting of leading Nazi industrialists in the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg, France. They admit the war is lost but lay out their plans for the next Reich, the fourth, which will be an economic empire.

"I simply moved that meeting to the fictional Hotel Savoy in Budapest and took the story from there," the author said.

Le Bor described the book -- his first novel after several nonfiction books -- as weaving "past and present together, just like everyday life everywhere in Eastern Europe.

"We walk on pavements once trodden by the Gestapo and the [Hungarian fascist] Arrow Cross, we marvel at the beauty of the Danube, which within living memory was also a watery grave for thousands of Jews," he said.

"But Hungary, certainly more than its neighbors, is making real efforts to remember what was lost at numerous memorials and Holocaust commemoration ceremonies. It also celebrates what remains at events like the Jewish summer festival," an annual event at the beginning of September.

"Jewish culture," Le Bor said, "is an ever-richer part of Budapest life."

Erin Einhorn's nonfiction memoir, "The Pages In Between," gripped me as much as -- or more than -- any fictional thriller.

The Detroit News called it "a detective story framed as a memoir." The story's subplots, it said, "reveal how memory often distorts the truth, and how family legend is often colored in its retelling."

The book recounts Einhorn's attempts to find out the truth about how her mother, who was born in the Polish city of Bedzin in 1942, survived the Holocaust.

Einhorn, then in her 20s, moved to Poland for a year in 2001. She found the house in Bedzin that once belonged to her family, met the descendants of the Christian woman who took in her mother as a baby and became immersed in an ever-widening web of truths, half-truths, myth and deception.

A reporter with the New York Daily News, Einhorn uses her journalistic skills to record not only her search for her mother's past but also her search to understand the present -- and, in a way, her search for her own identity.

Along the way she presents an honest and intensely vivid appraisal of contemporary Poland, especially the nuances and contradictions that compose the complexities of Poland's centuries-old relationship with the Jewish world.

Sadly, Einhorn's mother died at age 59, just as Einhorn was embarking on her project. That loss becomes a milestone that turns Einhorn's book into not just a search for family history, but a coming-of-age chronicle that links the past with an open-ended future.

I stayed up well past midnight to finish it.