Jews in Nazi-oppupied Warsaw during the 1940s were under increasing
threat as they were stripped of their rights and forced to live in a guarded
ghetto away from the non- Jewish Polish population. Within the ghettos,
a small but distinct group existed: the assimilated, acculturated, and baptized
Jews. Unwilling to integrate into the Jewish community and unable to
merge with the Polish one, they formed a group of their own, remaining
in a state of suspension throughout the interwar period. In 1940, with the
closure of the Jewish Residential Quarter in Warsaw, their identity was
chosen for them.
Person looks at what it meant for assimilated Jews to leave their prewar
neighborhoods, understood as both a physical environment and a mixed
Polish Jewish community, and enter a new, Jewish one. She reveals the
diversity of this group and how its members’ identity shaped their involvement
in and contribution to ghetto life. In the first English-language study
of this small but influential group, Person illuminates the important role of
the acculturated and assimilated Jews to the history and memory of the
Warsaw ghetto.
