Until the events of this century, 1648 had been perceived by Jews as Polish Jewry's darkest hour. It was then that Jewish communities in the Ukraine were destroyed. Many thousands of civilians were murdered, and untold numbers of others were terrorized and forced to flee. Some no doubt succeeded; others, stripped of their assets and, too often, their loved ones, languished.

Yet not everyone shared this perception of the fate of the Jews in south-eastern Poland in the mid-seventeenth century. Joel Raba's book is not an attempt to reconstruct the events of 1648 and the Swedish invasions that followed in their wake. Rather, it traces the changing perceptions of the fate of the Jews who lived in Poland during those years in the consciousness of subsequent generations, primarily of Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews.

After an introductory chapter on the development of historical consciousness, Raba meticulously gathers material concerning the fate of the Jews during the mid-seventeenth century in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He searches the works of observers and historians of peoples that were directly involved in the events (except for Swedish sources), as well as foreign reports such as contemporary diplomatic and personal accounts from the seventeenth century up to and including the post-Holocaust period. He also wisely includes historical views expressed in popular Ukrainian poetic works from the first half of the nineteenth century, before professional historians had emerged in this region.

Raba's survey shows that each people and each age viewed 1648 and its aftermath from its own perspective. The generation of Jews that actually endured the destruction was most concerned with recording the horrors and the scope of the disaster. For those who suffered, the catastrophe was not part of a long legacy of Jewish tribulations, but a unique and dreadful experience that was expressed with great emotion by people such as Natan Hannover. Soon after, Jews connected the events with a legacy of suffering that went back much earlier to the Middle Ages. Yet the plight of the Jews was only of marginal interest to authors of the other nationalities involved.