The Vienna Jewish Source Book. A centropa reader-volume 2

As anyone who has stood before a painting by Gustav Klimt will readily attest, Vienna's golden age literally glittered with gold. It began to glow in the 1850s and shone brightest from the turn-of-the-20th century until those pistol shots were fired in Sarajevo in 1914. Of course, no one knew then they had been living in a golden age. They would realize that only later, after the gold had been tarnished, stripped, and finally stolen.

How do Jews live in today's Austria and how do Vienna's oldest living Jews look back at an all-too-turbulent century? How do Austrians relate to their country's Jewish history, the Holocaust, and education? These are the weighty questions this volume of essays, along with personal reflections by Vienna's olest living Jews, will illuminate and illustrate. This is a book, then, about the world that was, the world that was destroyed, and the uneasy rebirth of Jewish life in Austria.