Powerfully and beautifully portrays a
bygone Jewish culture.
The story about the life of the Jews in
Eastern Europe which has come to an end in our days is what I
have tried to tell in this essay. I have not talked about their
books, their art or institutions, but about their daily life,
about their habits and customs, about their attitudes toward
the basic things in life, about the scale of values which
directed their aspirations…
In this period our people attained the
highest degree of inwardness…. It was the golden period
in Jewish history, in the history of the Jewish soul.
—from The
Earth Is the Lord’s
“Dr. Heschel re-creates the mind and
character of a whole people and of an entire era. Not only
Jews, but all who regard the culture of the inner life as
important will find this book moving and meaningful.”
—Virginia Kirkus
“Dr. Heschel admirably succeeds in
conveying much of the inner content and the glory of
traditional Jewish culture as it grew and throbbed in the towns
and villages of Central and Eastern Europe. In few and eloquent
pages the world can learn what it has lost.”
—Marvin Lowenthal, New York
Herald Tribune Book Review
“I do not know of any work in which
the spiritual life of Eastern European Jewry is portrayed with
such complete understanding and thorough appreciation.”
—Dr.
Louis Finkelstein
“There are few books in English that
plunge us so deeply into the depths of Jewish reality.”
—Irving
Kristol, Commentary
