Home after Fascism

What was life like for Jews who wanted to return to their former homes in Europe after the Holocaust? In Home after Fascism, Anna Koch draws on a rich array of interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the first-person homecoming stories of Jews in East Germany, West Germany, and Italy and explore the variety of ways they reconnected to the countries that had destroyed their homes, ostracized them, and killed and imprisoned their loved ones.

Even as returning Jews worked to recover lost or looted homes and possessions, they also struggled to make sense of their persecution and find a way to reclaim a sense of home. Essential to that reconnection, Koch argues, was the development of "emotional communities," which helped returnees process and reinterpret their feelings toward the countries they had fled for their lives and safety. Jews in West Germany emphasized detachment and marking their distance to justify living in a "country of murderers"; communists of Jewish origin in East Germany stressed an emotional connection to their comrades; and Italian Jews' emphasis on the historical attachment to their homeland highlighted their belonging within the national community of Italy.

Comparative, wide ranging, and often moving, Home after Fascism? reveals the determined resilience of a displaced generation of Jewish people following different paths across Europe to recover the feeling, reality, and power of home.