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The Incredible Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Bochnia (68715)
The Story of a Galician Jew – Persecution, Liberation, Transformation
| Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz |
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| Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz
is Chair of the Graduate
Program in Contemporary Jewry and Associate Professor of Jewish
History at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. She is
the author of numerous books and articles about the Holocaust,
Gender, Memory, State of Israel, and Commemoration. Among her
books are Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust
(Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), and Perfect Heroes: The World
War II Parachutists and Collective Israeli Memory (forthcoming,
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
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This a book about Chaskel
Tydor, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, who was at various
times a bookkeeper, metallurgist, kibbutz founder, Hebrew book publisher,
uranium mine manager, and travel agent. Spanning close to ninety
years of life, his story takes the reader through three continents,
two marriages, and one Holocaust. At the same time, it is also the
story of much of the Jewish people during the twentieth century,
or at least those who found themselves wandering between countries,
learning to function in new languages and societies, building and
joining various Jewish communities, and continuously adopting different
outward ways of life while trying to maintain their Jewish beliefs
and practices.
… Through the story of one, albeit unique man, we learn the
history of an era: Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the First
World War, events in Weimar and Hitler's Germany during the 1920s
and 1930s, the struggle for survival in Nazi camps, the creation
of the State of Israel, Jewish life in the United States after the
Second World War including in far-flung areas such as Montana and
South Dakota, and finally, the events in Israel following the Yom
Kippur War and up to and including the first Intifada (1987).
This a book of Jewish survival and triumph chronicling the transformation
and rebirth not only of one man but of an entire Jewish world.
… Throughout the book Dr Baumel-Schwartz provides substantive
Further Reading lists and bibliographic information which allows
readers to source and compare other scholarship and writings on
the places and historical circumstances presented.
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Preface
Foreword
by Walter Laqueur Introduction:
Givatayim 1993
Chapter 1 Bochnia 1903-1914
Chapter 2 Munich 1914-1920
Chapter 3 Frankfurt-Lodz-Frankfurt 1920-1939
Chapter 4 Buchenwald-Auschwitz-Buchenwald
1939-1945
Chapter 5 Geringshof 1945
Chapter 6 Jerusalem-Tel Aviv 1945-1951
Chapter 7 New York 1951-1957
Chapter 8 Rapid City, SD and Deer Lodge Montana
1958-1959
Chapter 9 New York 1959-1974
Chapter 10 Ramat Gan-Givatayim 1974-1993
Epilogue
– Bochnia 2007
Further
Reading
Bibliography
Index
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“The author’s
father Haskel Tydor and I were together in Buna and Buchenwald.
Her absorbing and moving biography of him communicates his commitment
to the Jewish people and its tradition, his warmth and his wisdom.”
Elie Wiesel
“Chaskel Tydor miraculously survived six years of the camps
which had been built to exterminate European Jewry. He was a modest
man with no ambitions of leadership but in the camp when leadership
was needed and was thrust on him he emerged in a position of authority;
he maintained such a position in the years after the liberation
when he was instrumental in establishing Kibbutz Buchenwald. …
This painstaking biography, a true labor of love by the hands of
an experienced historian, deals primarily with the life of one man
who had lost his wife and most of his other relations and friends
in these Holocaust years and had to face life after the liberation.
How could he have found the way to a new life?” From the
Foreword by Walter Laqueur, editor of The Holocaust Encyclopedia
(Yale University Press)
“I read this book with the advantage/disadvantage of having
participated in two or three courses taught by the author. I know
her as a highly serious educator with a special sense of humor.
This book is not an historical text, but a biography of the author’s
father, an Ostjude who survived five years in concentration camps,
saved many people, and lived an eventful life after the war. The
book is well written, portraying the subject very closely with a
careful attempt to explain the historical context of the events.
The author also examines the problem of moral choice in extreme
situations. Although the biographer is too close to the subject
of her work and the problem of perspective arises, it is a minor
problem to my mind. I was reading a thriller in parallel and it
was the thriller that I neglected. Be warned!” AJL Newsletter
“Baumel-Schwartz grew up listening to her Holocaust survivor
father’s tales of a fictional adventurer named ‘Buffalo
Bill from Bochnia.’ In this biography, she combines interviews
with the late Haskel Tydor (inmate # 68715 who was in Buchenwald
with Elie Wiesel) with her study of Kibbutz Buchenwald, the first
post-war kibbutz in liberated Germany which he helped found in 1945.
She traces her father’s life from Poland to Palestine/Israel
and the US. The book includes a foreword noting the lack of data
on the number of concentration camps survivors, photographs, further
reading, and a bibliography.” Reference & Research
Book News |
Publication Details
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Paperback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-380-5 |
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Page Extent / Format: |
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256 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
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Release Date: |
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January 2010 |
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Illustrated: |
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No |
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Hardback Price: |
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£19.95 / $34.95 |
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| This book can be ordered online or by telephone. |
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For the UK and Rest of the World:
Gazelle Book Services
tel. 44 (0)1524-68765 |
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For the United States:
International Specialized Book Services
tel. (1) 503 287-3093 or (800) 944-6190 |
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For Canada:
University of Toronto Distribution
tel. (1) 800-565-9523 |
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