On the Margins

"What distinguishes this volume from other more traditional histories is the interconnectedness of the author and his personal context with his historical subject. Weiss-Wendt interweaves his own career trajectory and historical and social questions into the contemporary world of Estonia, the historiographical debates about the Final Solution in eastern Europe, and the roll of antisemitism in the history of Estonia and its collaboration with the German occupiers during the war. The result is a unique and compelling collection of essays that sometimes do not hold together, yet which if taken as a whole and read in the spirit for which they are intended, offer real insight and meaning into much neglected areas of Estonian, German, Soviet, and Jewish histories."—Slavic Review

"In the vast spectrum of books concerned with modern Jewish history, On the Margins is highly distinctive and unusually compelling. While focusing on a supposedly 'marginal' entity, Anton Weiss-Wendt demonstrates that we have the potential to learn a great deal about European Jewish history, comprehensively, through an illumination of Estonia's Jews—which fit few of the perceived conventions of Jewish life. It is on the one hand deeply tragic—an interpretation of a country that the Nazis boasted had cleansed itself of its Jews. But on the other hand, Jews in Estonia, while small in number, seemed to embody 'normalcy' before and after the Holocaust—with the lack of attention remarkable in itself. We are indeed fortunate that a talented scholar with courage and integrity has a produced a work that is both deeply personal and a critical part of the whole of Jewish and human history."—Michael Berkowitz

"Anton Weiss-Wendt provides us with a fascinating and important examination of the Holocaust in Estonia and, crucially, Jewish life before the war. Two decades of research inform this original contribution to Estonian and Jewish history. His judicious and meticulous documentation provide needed perspective to a heated and contentious topic. Yet the work is anything but dry—Weiss-Wendt writes as fluidly and compellingly about the broader geopolitics of the region as he does the individual lives affected by the tragic history of the region. The exceptional depth achieved in this volume provides a model for scholarship . . . and will be of broad interest to researchers of both Jewish and Holocaust history generally."—Doyle E. Stevick

"In the context of Jewish history, Estonia long had an image of a haven for anybody who thought differently. The book by Weiss-Wendt challenges this conventional stereotype. It tells a sad story of a tiny and exotic ethnic group, the Jews, who Estonians bestowed minority rights on in the interwar period, helped to exterminate during the Holocaust, marginalized in the post-war period, and vilified in the post-1991 Estonia. The author of the book made an effort to reclaim the memory of the Estonian Jews from the realm of the exotic. This book reads like a warning: it suggests that a people who marginalize a minority and the memory of that minority might themselves be easily marginalized as exotic and insignificant."—Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern