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This is a memoir about the power of American assimilation and opportunity in the face of persisting refugee realities. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Monroe Price recounts the continuing impact of European identities as families, cast from their homes by the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, struggle to find their way in a new and challenging environment.

In a series of reflections, Price, who was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938 and left when he was seven months old, seeks to create the Vienna of his infancy, including Jewish life, anti-Semitism, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht (during which his father was arrested). He shifts to scenes of American socialization in the places he moved with his parents:: Macon, Georgia, Cincinnati, Ohio, and the experience of New York City. Through these reflections, Price illuminates ideas about family, religion, friends and schooling as well as deeply personal issues such as home, food and intimacy.

Price’s memoir weaves complicated strands—his Viennese origins, campaigns to distribute Jewish refugees away from New York City, the special qualities of Midwestern Ohio life in the 1950s—and the contrasting patterns of adjustment by different generations in his family in the American landscape. As he traces the particular path of his own life, Price reveals a more universal story of adjustment, and the relationship between a marginal community and the drama of American citizenship.

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940–41 are among the issues addressed in the book but most profoundly, the book wrestles with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia.

Specifically, it examines the quasi-legal system of murder instituted in Nazi-occupied Estonia, confiscation of Jewish property, and Jewish forced labor camps and develops an analysis of the causes of collaboration during the Holocaust. The book also explores the dynamics of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union since the 1960s and so-called denaturalization trials in the United States in the 1980s. The haunting memory of Soviet and Nazi rule, the book concludes, prevents a larger segment of today’s Estonian population from facing up to the Holocaust and the universal message that it carries.E

Simone Weil was an extraordinary woman whose brief life was intensely devoted to searching for answers to some of the gravest questions inherent in the human condition: the nature of justice, the reasons for human exploitation, the problem of faith. Although debate still lingers about the interpretation of her life and her writings, many contemporary scholars consider her one of the most brilliant, original minds of the twentieth century. This collection of essays by Simone Weil deals with the controversial sociopolitical issues which have confronted us since the time of the French Revolution. The first essay was written in 1932 or 1933 when she was still in her twenties. The last remained unfinished when she died in England at the age of 34, a French-Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied France. 

The essays take a long, close look at Marx and Marxism, and at socialism versus capitalism vis-à-vis labor and the working class. Weil evaluates individuals, ideologies, and institutions with reference to two kinds and uses of power: oppression, which leads ultimately to enslavement or death; and liberty, which leads to humaneness, justice, and charity.