The book under review began, as is often the case, in a much humbler form, as a cycle of articles published in the unforgettable year of 1981 in the Warsaw weekly Folksztyme, the organ of Poland's now non-existent Jews. The articles took as their subject the Jews of Poland in the inter-war years 1918-1939. The author, Professor Jerzy Tomaszewski, is an outstanding economic historian, a Pole who knows Yiddish and is also concerned with the history of national minorities in Poland.

As noted above, the weekly Folksztyme does not possess the readers it is supposedly addressing, but it is read by Jews abroad and also has its Polish readers. Tomaszewski's articles found a keen audience among the latter. I have been informed that copies of Folksztyme were bought solely on the strength of these articles, much as newspapers are commonly bought for some sensational story.

Since it is difficult to describe Tomaszewski's synthetic essays as sensational, one may ask oneself what the young Polish intellectuals were looking for. An attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to that question would extend beyond the acceptable limits of a review and is worthy of a separate article. I will simply note here that the interest in Jews on the part of the younger generation is partly historical and partly futurological. People dissatisfied with Poland's present status search for information about the difficult problem of the coexistence of diverse nationalities in order to build a model for future political relations. However, it is not difficult to perceive a need to expiate a dishonourable past and the deeds of fathers and grandfathers.

It is difficult to find information on the history of national relations in Poland. Historians, regardless even of their political views, treat these issues casually, of little central relevance to Poland's development, and sometimes even dishonestly. For this reason the qualities of Tomaszewski's articles, which were thorough and dispassionate, internalizing the minorities as a part of Polish history, were acknowledged by his readers. (This appreciation was neither universal nor unanimous, for the anger caused by the Folksztyme articles was discernible in the campaign stirred up against Tomaszewski in 1984.) The public response enabled the author to broaden the limited intention of the original articles and add pieces on other minorities. Four years later these were published in the form of the present book.