"Exquisite. A true discovery: a diary that tells of a young Jewish woman's longing to belong while her culture tries to come of age."-- Kirkus Reviews "Auerbach's rich, insightful case study of one Polish family's experiences across generations offers powerful evidence that the ambiguities of Jewish self-understandings could both inhibit and expand possibilities for Central Europeans."--Lisa Silverman, author of The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust "If not for the prodigious research and deep analytic perspective, one might think that Karen Auerbach has written a novel. The individuals on these pages are vivid and soulful, real people faced with circumstances which they thought they could control doing their best in a complex new reality. As readers, we share their hopes and agonies. More historians should be writing like this."--Hasia Diner, New York University "A nuanced account of the tragic story of the unrequited love of the Warsaw Jewish elite for the Polish nation.

Auerbach's focus on the shattered hopes of one family endows its tribulations with concrete immediacy."--Todd M. Endelman, University of Michigan "A masterful use of the diary of Alicja Lewental to narrate the story of prominent members of Warsaw's late nineteenth-century Jewish economic elite and their ultimately futile efforts to be perceived as 'Poles' against the rising tide of ethnonationalism."--Robert Blobaum, West Virginia University "A sensitive, exquisitely drawn portrait of a young Jewish woman's embrace of Polish culture and identity at the turn of the twentieth century, a time of increasingly exclusionary nationalist sentiment. Alicja Lewental's quest for belonging is explored through the dual lens of her own unpublished diary and the ceaseless efforts of Warsaw Jewry's economic and social elites to achieve integration, and--more precariously--acceptance."--Hillel J. Kieval, author of Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder at Europe's Fin de Siècle.