Dreamland (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Howard M. Sachar
- First Published: 2002
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: 1919-1939
- Setting: Europe
- Principal Characters: Léon Blum, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, Louis Marshall, Jozef Pilsudski, Walter Rathenau, Lucien Wolf
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: Civil rights, Freedom, Twentieth century, Europe or Europeans, World War II, Depression, economic, 1910’s, 1920’s, 1930’s, Jews or Jewish life, Anti-Semitism, Minorities, Equality, Nazism or Nazis, Holocaust, Jewish, Poland or Polish people, Persecution, Hungary or Hungarians
- Locales: Europe
Howard Sachar takes as his epigraph Lysander’s speech in the first act of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pr. c. 1595-1596) on the fragility of love, which, he says, lasts no longer than a flash of lightning. Similarly, Sachar shows how rapidly in many European nations the Jewish dream of liberty and equality faded in the period between the two world wars.
The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 guaranteed civil rights and cultural autonomy to all Poland’s minorities. Jews were granted two additional rights: to administer state funding for Jewish schools...
[The entire page is 1789 words long]
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