A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth-century Galicia

by Joseph Margoshes, Rebecca Margolis (Translator)

Overview

In 1936, Joseph Margoshes (1866-1955), a writer for the New York Yiddish daily Morgen Journal, published a memoir of his youth in Austro-Hungarian Galicia entitled Erinerungen fun mayn leben. In this autobiography, he evoked a world that had been changed almost beyond recognition as a result of the First World War and was shortly to be completely obliterated by the Holocaust. In telling his story, Margoshes gives the reader important insights into the many-faceted Jewish life of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. We read of the Orthodox and the Enlightened, urban and rural life, Jews and their gentile neighbors, and much more. This book is an important evocation of an entire Jewish society and civilization and bears comparison with Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk's masterful evocation of Jewish life in Poland, Poyln.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014484060
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	09/01/2008
Series:	Judaism and Jewish Life , #8
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Joseph Margoshes was born in Lemberg (Lvov/Lviv) and received a traditional Jewish education in Bible and Talmud as well as German language and European culture. He immigrated to America in 1989, returned to Europe in 1900 and came back to America in 1903 - this time to stay. At this time, he began working in the New York Yiddish Press and contributed to many newspapers and periodicals including the Morgen Journal.

Editorial Reviews

This delightful memoir, written in Yiddish in the 1930s (and published in Yiddish in 1936), evokes life in Galicia and the author’s own personal saga. Eliezer Margoshes (1866-1955) was born in Lemberg (Lvov) and came to America at the turn of the century. In the States, he wrote for Yiddish newspapers. The book is rich in descriptions of traditional education, famous (and not so famous) rabbis, the process or modernization and change, as well as many topics relevant to social history.

Shaul Stampfer

A World Apart is an absorbing and entertaining work as well as a matter-of-fact narrative full of gripping detail. It could doubtless also serve as a historical source although, like many memoirs, it has no scholarly apparatus. It is to be hoped that this historical narrative will find many readers eager to plunge into the rich and colourful cultural and ideological worlds of Eastern European Jewry before the Shoah.

Desanka Schwara