National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe by Ruth Ellen Gruber

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National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe by Europe Travel Books

National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe by Ruth Ellen Gruber
Price: $12.89

Features

Paperback: 352 pages

Publisher: National Geographic March 20, 2007

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1426200463

ISBN-13: 978-1426200465

Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.1 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds

Product Description
Journalist, author, and travel expert Ruth Ellen Gruber presents a new edition of her acclaimed 1992 guide to Jewish heritage sites in Eastern Europe. Widely acknowledged as the best and most comprehensive book of its kind, this is the only Jewish travel guidebook that takes visitors to hundreds of fascinating sites in small villages and remote hamlets as well as major cities.

This expanded and updated edition includes new coverage of Austria, Ukraine, and Lithuania in addition to Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and all of the former Yugoslavia, areas that are the ancestral home to the great majority of North American Jews. Gruber provides specific historical and cultural information about these Central and Eastern European nations. Then she journeys across each country, exploring Jewish roots in major cities and small shtetls, describing the vestiges of each Jewish community and offering personal insights and reflections on the various people she meets.

Readers will find a wealth of practical travel information throughout, including a language guide, listings of useful local addresses, and up-to-date details on sites that have only recently become accessible to visitors. From exploring the massive 16th-century synagogue in the historic Polish town of Pincrow to strolling among the 12,000 headstones crowded into the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, to meeting resident Jews proudly embracing their ancient culture in Slovenia, this volume takes you on a very special and memorable tour.

About The Author
Ruth Ellen Gruber an American writer based in Europe, has published and lectured widely on contemporary Jewish issues in Europe and has traveled extensively throughout east and central Europe documenting Jewish heritage sites. She writes a regular Jewish travel column for www.centropa.org and contributes to many publications. A foreign correspondent with UPI for more than a decade, Gruber has won two Simon Rockover awards for excellence in Jewish journalism. Currently, she divides her time between a farmhouse in Umbria and an apartment in Budapest.

Reader Reviews
Wow! This book is no mere travel guide! I had intended only to riffle through the pages. Instead, I read the entire book, unable to resist being carried along on a most remarkable tour. Jewish Heritage Travel is rich with information about the geography, culture, religions, architecture, and thousands of years of history in a part of the world that has deep significance for the human story. For, let's face it, shockingly horrible things happened here. While the book is organized like a travel guide, its dramatic impact is unmistakable and resonates with the reader long after the book has been set down. Ruth Ellen Gruber is a most compelling guide. Her descriptions of specific towns, synagogues, cemeteries, and "evocative remnants of shtetls" are not warmed-over fifth-hand accounts. She is forever scrambling over walls, swimming through weed grown fields, tramping through shin deep snow, knocking on doors, crawling through holes in ruined walls, and striking up conversations with strangers. One trusts her reports utterly. And she knows everything. Why Jews were invited into this area, or driven from that one, and when, and by whom, and who these people were, how they worshiped, how they differed from one another, and what their destiny became. She tells us about their land, their history, their architecture, their persecutors, their champions. She finds their cemeteries, describes their headstones, and reads us the inscriptions. If people were taken by the thousands into the woods outside their towns, shot and dropped into ditches, she tells us that too. Gruber's narrative style is intriguing. The prose is always crisp and objective with a reportorial attention to detail and an allegiance to fact, but sometimes it rises to pure lyricism. The result is a deeply evocative, richly detailed account and the reader finds himself on a journey that is both informative and poignant. The small black-and-white photos are remarkably clear and helpful, and are placed near to the relevant text. They are of an excellent quality. This is small thing, perhaps, but important in its effect. There is a good map at the front of the book. Within each chapter, and at each chapter's end, are numerous additional resources - publications, web sites, addresses of note, and more. The index is stellar. In the final analysis, this book is destined to become a classic of travel literature because it is illuminating in so many ways. Its readership should not be limited to a specific, relatively small group of travelers, and at the small price the book is offered, it needn't be.

National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe
List Price: $18.95
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Price: $12.89
Updated on 10-31-2008.