Yaffa Eliach, Vintage Books, 1982/1988
Billing itself as ‘the first original Hasidic tales in a century’, Professor Eliach’s remarkable book has become a well known classic, well beyond the Jewish community. It tells pointed, moving and sometimes impossibly painful stories of heroism, normality and almost superhuman religious devotion in situations of despicable evil. Yaffa Eliach enjoyed a close personal relationship with Rabbi Israel Spira, the Hasidic Rebbe of Bluzhov, from whom many of the most remarkable stories originate. All the stories are traced to their sources and even dated, avoiding the hagiographic nature of some story books. Yaffa Eliach is a respected Holocaust historian and a gifted story teller – the book is a marvellous testimony to the victims of the Nazi evil and their indomitable spirit. Professor Eliach is also the author of ‘There once was a world: a 900-year chronicle of the shtetl of Eishyshok’. I have this book; once I’ve read it, I hope it will feature in this column.
Hasidic Tales Of The Holocaust
