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Steven E. Aschheim, Bernard Wasserstein. On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 924–926, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.924
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This brilliant book by Bernard Wasserstein is difficult to classify. It is a kind of conventional history, a panoramic and prodigiously comprehensive socioeconomic and political survey of European Jewry in the 1930s. In that sense it may be employed as a primer packed with information of all kinds and complete with photographic illustrations. At another level, and more fundamentally, it attempts “to restore forgotten men, women and children to the historical record, to breathe renewed life momentarily into those who were soon to be dry bones” (p. xxi). The book's motto is taken from Simon Dubnow's proclamation that the “historian's essential creative act is the resurrection of the dead.” This 550-page tome is also animated by a singular thesis: that for the (remarkably diverse) Jews of Europe, the decade of the 1930s was characterized not only by a rapidly spreading and insidious anti-Jewish hostility but also by longer-term processes of internal divisions, pauperization, assimilatory forces, linguistic differentiation, and demographic decline. By 1939, Wasserstein declares, “European Jewry was close to terminal collapse” (p. xvii).
