This episode of menassehcast is based upon a recording of a public interview with the historian Bernard Wasserstein, about his latest book A Small Town In Ukraine, the place we came from, the place we went back to. The interview was occasioned both by the publication of this book and an exhibition in the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam titled Me Jewish featuring Dutch-Jewish “ego documents” such as diaries, memoirs, and letters.
Wasserstein’s book is, as he writes himself the product of an underlying ”obsession”, to know everything about the history of the small town Krakowiec, where his fathers family came from and which’s history situated it alternatively in Poland, the Habsburg empire, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. In the book Wasserstein not only offers a vivid picture of the town’s history but also how its inhabitants, including his own family suffered the impact of many great historical events. Prof Wasserstein speaks about this town Krakowiec, his book, and the challenges of the historian who writes about his own background.