American Jews are, for the most part, quite happy to share in this present-mindedness. Yet, as so often happens, the Jewish case is not quite the same as that of other groups. Jewishness is not only an ethnicity, it is a religion, which means that practicing Jews automatically maintain a connection to the whole of Jewish history, as it is recorded in scripture, the liturgy, and the calendar. Perhaps even more important in dictating American Jewish attitudes toward Jewish history, however, is the way the Holocaust profoundly altered the course of that history.

The Irish and the Italians and the Chinese have an “old country,” which can be visited and nostalgized over. But for most American Jews, most of whose ancestors came to this country from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the old country was destroyed in the Holocaust. For a Jewish tourist, going to Poland means a tour of concentration camp sites, not a visit to distant relatives. And the destruction of that Jewish civilization means, paradoxically, that its American descendants cannot let it go, the way other immigrant groups can let their history go, knowing that the mother country is pursuing its own story in parallel to the American story. Because there is no more old country, it is up to us to keep it alive in memory, or else it will totally cease to exist.

This predicament helps to explain why American Jewish historical consciousness proceeds on two tracks. On the one hand, Jewish history is constantly being written and investigated, with great ingenuity and passion: Not only is there a thriving field of academic Jewish studies, there is a robust lay readership that buys large numbers of books on Jewish history. On the other hand, most of us take our images of the lives our great-grandparents led from the lyrics of Fiddler on the Roof, the photographs of Roman Vishniac, and movies like Schindler’s List: the whole doomed romance of the shtetl, conceived as a sepia-tinged world of simple piety and lost authenticity. (Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet, wrote about how the Vishniac photos, in particular, help to construct a mythic past.) And that synthetic image, because it seems so totally different from the world we live in now, only increases our sense of alienation and guilt toward the East European Jewish past. This guilt—the guilt of the survivors, of those who flourished toward those who perished—is responsible for much of our sentimentality about “the world of our fathers.”

It is for this reason that a book like The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume II: 1881 to 1914, by Antony Polonsky (Littman Library), is so important. It is a big, dense survey, reading at times like a textbook, and it makes up the middle third of an even bigger work. (Polonsky’s first volume covered the years 1350 to 1881, and his third will cover 1914 to the present.) For these reasons—and because of its hefty cover price, $59.50 for the hardcover edition—it would ordinarily be read only by specialists or students. But any reader who invests the time and money to read the book, or read in it, will find it very rewarding—and not just because of the wealth of information it contains. What Polonsky’s book brings home, in a way that a narrower study could not, is the sheer complexity and vitality of Jewish life in that time and place. Far from inhabiting a slower, simpler “old world,” the Jews of Eastern Europe, in the period Polonsky discusses, were feeling the full force of modernity—politically, culturally, socially, and economically—and were struggling urgently to cope with it.

The period 1881-1914 is especially interesting to American Jewish readers because it was in exactly these years that most of our ancestors came to this country. Starting in 1880, Polonsky writes, some 2.2 million Jews left the Russian Empire, which included most of the Polish Jewish heartland, and 1.75 million of them ended up in the United States. The exodus of Jews was so massive that, by 1920, by far the largest Ashkenazi Jewish city in the world was New York, with 1.8 million Jews, compared to just 350,000 in Warsaw, the next largest.

Naturally, millions of people do not flee a country where they are happy, and the scale of Jewish emigration offers a sense of how desperate the Jews of Russia and Poland were becoming. Indeed, the first paragraph of Polonsky’s book offers a grim summary of its whole story: “During this period the crisis caused by the deteriorating position of Russian Jewry was the motor which drove world Jewry.” That crisis began abruptly in 1881, when the relatively liberal Czar Alexander II was assassinated by a revolutionary group. His successor, Alexander III, was a reactionary with a particular animus toward Jews, and the beginning of his reign was marked by a wave of deadly pogroms—more than 250 over three years, which took 45 lives and caused much material damage.

At the same time, the new czar approved the infamous May Laws, which prohibited Jews from living in villages or buying land. This “legislative pogrom,” in the words of the pioneering Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, had the effect of concentrating the Jewish population in desperately poor towns and cities, causing an economic crisis. It also marked an end to the previous Russian policy of trying to assimilate the Jews into the Russian empire. From now on, the Jews were treated more or less openly as enemies by the Czarist government. Polonsky writes that “when advised to end the repression of the Jews, [the Czar] had observed, ‘But we must never forget that the Jews crucified our Lord and shed his precious blood.’ ”

Things were somewhat better in Austrian Poland, where millions of Jews lived in the province of Galicia, and even better in the small Prussian-ruled section of Poland, where Jews achieved the greatest degree of equality. (Indeed, reading Polonsky brings home the terrible irony of the fact that it would be Germany that ended up committing a genocide of the Jews, while Russia, under Soviet rule, was effectively their best defender; from the vantage point of 1900, exactly the opposite might have been predicted.) But in each territory, Polonsky shows, the Jews energetically debated the best ways to adapt to the pressures of the modern world.

The biggest change in this period was the eclipse of the old-fashioned, assimilationist liberals, who had hoped that the Jews—by learning Russian or Polish and joining the surrounding culture—might lose their outsider status. This idealistic view ran up against the evident persistence of anti-Semitism and the seeming impossibility of finding any political allies among Russians or Poles. As a result, many Jews turned in these years to Zionism or Communism, or one of the many offshoots or hybrids of these movements. Polonsky shows that Jewish life in these years was thoroughly politicized, to a much greater degree than it is in America today. In fact, the major effect of the Zionist movement, up to 1914, was not felt in Palestine but in Poland, where the emergence of Jewish nationalism transformed the ways Jews thought about themselves and their fate.

Not surprisingly, however, this new assertiveness, provoked by anti-Semitism, spurred even more anti-Semitism. One of the most famous Hebrew poems, “In the City of Slaughter” by Chaim Nachman Bialik, was a ferocious rebuke to the Jews of Kishinev for failing to fight back during the pogrom of 1903. Bialik imagined “the heirs of Hasmoneans” hiding from their attackers in outhouses and allowing their wives to be raped. But later that year, Polonsky shows, when 200 members of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party, took up arms in self-defense during a pogrom in Gomel, the Czarist government accused them of organizing an “anti-Russian pogrom,” and the army ended up firing on them. In the ensuing trials, 12 non-Jews, and 18 Jews, were sent to jail. The notion that the Jews were enemies of the state went on to become a staple of government and right-wing propaganda, especially after the abortive revolution of 1905.

The first half of Polonsky’s book deals with this kind of political history. But the second half, where he turns to internal Jewish developments in the areas of family life and religion, literature and theater, is perhaps more important and rewarding. Here, too, the conflicts were very intense, sometimes even bloody: When some Jews in Lvov established a “progressive” synagogue in the 1840s, its first rabbi was poisoned, along with his family, by an “Orthodox fanatic.” As this story shows, Polonsky is happy to violate the chronological bounds of his subtitle when necessary, and sometimes—as in his detailed discussion of the spread of Hasidism—he goes back as far as the 18th century.

But this broader picture is needed to make sense of the social changes that were accelerating by the late 19th century—above all, in the situation of women, the subject of one of Polonsky’s best chapters. He notes the irony that the most advanced Jewish reformers, the maskilim, were usually the most misogynistic, blaming Jewish backwardness on superstitious and aggressive women (many maskilim, Polonsky writes, had a lot of trouble with their mothers-in-law). On the other hand, the fact that Jewish girls were forbidden to study Hebrew and Talmud left them freer than the boys to learn secular languages and literature, resulting in frequent culture clashes. The “cultured” girl forced to marry an unworldly yeshiva bocher became a favorite plot for novels and plays.

And it was in this period that secular Jewish literature began to thrive. In addition to examining the mass-circulation newspapers (Haynt, the Warsaw Yiddish paper, sold 150,000 copies daily) and the Yiddish theater, Polonsky offers an excellent survey of the classic Jewish literature of the period, from the Yiddish populist Sholem Aleichem to the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky, who used the language of the Bible to praise the pagan god Apollo: “I am the Jew: your adversary of old!/I come to you, before your statue kneeling,/your image—symbol of life’s brightness.” No picture of our ancestors that doesn’t have room for this kind of paradox can be true to life. Polonsky’s panoramic book, which packs so much vivid detail and statistical information into its 500 pages, helps to show just how rich, and how difficult, that life really was.

Feivel Goldschwartz, a 21-year-old worker in a Warsaw clothing factory was a stand-up guy. In 1927, he and 18-year-old Reyzl (Ruzhe) Shulkleynot had been an item for six months and were engaged to be married. Reyzl accepted the thin engagement ring Feivel offered her, even though the young man’s family was against the match; they thought Reyzl was low-class trash and didn’t want her in the mishpokhe. They weren’t entirely wrong; Reyzl’s mother had died when she was a baby and her father, who was well known to Warsaw police as a fence, raised her alone on a particularly rank stretch of Volinska Street, a road in one of the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Family pressures grew too strong and eventually Feivel was persuaded to dump Reyzl. He wanted to end things on a happy note and broke the news on a hot July night. They took a walk. Feivel wanted to get his ring back and offered Reyzl 20 zloty for it. Realizing their engagement was over, she took the money and gave him back the jewelry.

The breakup seemed amicable and Reyzl asked if Feivel would walk her to her apartment building, which also housed a low-end brothel run by Rivka “the Cow” Linderbaum and her son, Khatzkel, a notorious pimp. Feivel agreed to escort her to the front steps. When they got there, the two began to kiss. In the shadows at the side of the stairs, Reyzl began slithering downward, descending to her knees. Though they were broken up, Feivel didn’t stop her. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain like none he’d ever felt before. He collapsed on the macadam and looked up at Reyzl, cackling as she made her way up the stairs, her face and blouse spattered with blood. Feivel looked down. She had bit his penis in half.

Feivel screamed. A pool of dark blood had already spread around him. People came running. Someone called an ambulance. Someone also went to Feivel’s house and told his sister Golda he had been attacked. She raced to Volinska Street, bumping on the way into Reyzl, whose face and neck were flecked with dried blood. “Your brother got stabbed at the whorehouse! He was there to find another bride-to-be!” Reyzl told Golda angrily. Realizing she wore incriminating stains, she quickly added, “I got all this blood on me when I tried to help him.”

Feivel was rushed to the Jewish hospital on Tshista Street. Though emergency-room doctors were able to staunch the bleeding, they were concerned that the young man would contract blood poisoning, which could kill him. Meanwhile, word about the attack spread in Jewish Warsaw, and the hospital was deluged with curious gawkers. The crowd situation became so bad, that doctors were forced to hold an impromptu press conference announcing that Feivel Goldschwartz was expected to survive and although he would have to live with a defective penis, he’d still be able to produce children. What a relief.

The Warsaw police arrested Reyzl and her father that night. He said he didn’t know anything about what transpired and that he was sleeping soundly at home at the time the young man’s tragedy occurred. Reyzl also hotly denied that she had anything to do with the incident, telling the police that she was on her way home when she saw that Goldschwartz had been “done.” While the police released her father from custody, Reyzl was held in the local precinct’s clink.

Adding insult to injury, detectives came to the hospital and charged Goldschwartz with corrupting a minor after Reyzl informed them she was not actually 18. Even worse for poor Feivel, Haynt, one of the city’s Yiddish dailies, published a report that claimed the boy did not bear “any ill will toward Reyzl and still wanted to marry her.” The same paper reported that he was the one who had attacked her that night on the stairs. Infuriated, he was forced to give an exclusive interview to a competing daily, Moment, in which he vehemently refuted these claims.

All of this exhausted poor Feivel and his condition worsened. While he languished in the hospital on Tshista Street, Reyzl sat in jail, though she was occasionally brought to court for hearings. Huge crowds gathered to howl at her during these perp walks. Once, a herd of angry rubberneckers attacked some other female hood who’d been misidentified while being escorted by police to jail. As a result, Moment printed a photograph of the real Reyzl so that people could see her likeness and refrain from attacking random maidens who “might be her.”

While Feivel’s condition vacillated, Reyzl waited fearfully in prison. After all, if he died, she would be tried for murder. Fortunately for her, the penis-repair department at Warsaw’s Jewish Hospital succeeded in saving the young man and she was charged with assault and forced to serve a relatively short sentence.

No one knows what ultimately became of Reyzl Shulkleynot or, for that matter, Feivel Goldschwartz and his defective but working organ. They were but two urban denizens who disappeared into the Jewish urban maelstrom that was Warsaw during the late 1920s.