[In the following review, Lipton praises Hoffman for her unique approach to the question of Polish anti-Semitism and complicity in the Holocaust in Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews.]

Shtetl is a daring and generous book, measured in style, passionate in intent. It was, I do believe, written for love. Not for the love of a person or a country, but for some configuration of home, for a laying bare of mysterious and destructive ancient mechanisms that, once understood—one hopes, one prays—may bring warring partners, even a divided heart or country, to actually see the other side, allowing each to have a home, a place from which to understand and to desire.

Eva Hoffman was born in Poland to Jewish parents in 1945 and immigrated to Canada when she was 13. She is the author of the witty and poignant memoir Lost in Translation (1990) and the less compelling but interesting journalistic trek through Eastern Europe, Exit into History (1993). In Shtetl she wades into the roiling waters of one of the most hotly contested and feverishly felt subjects in the discussion of the Holocaust, the question of the responsibility of Poles toward Polish Jews. “This book is an effort,” she writes, “to counter … the notion that ordinary Poles were naturally inclined, by the virtue of their congenital anti-Semitism, to participate in the genocide, and that Poles even today must be viewed with extreme suspicion or condemned as guilty for the fate of the Jews in their country. My aim is not to absolve any more than it is to condemn, but it is, at the very least, to complicate and historicize this picture.”

Even so, Shtetl may seem to many an apologia. To them any thoughtful treatment of Poles will feel like a betrayal, so fixed is their conviction of Polish guilt. This is as true in Paris as it is in New York, among gentiles as well as Jews. For example, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, generally considered the most powerful recent film about the Holocaust, is laced with a hatred of Poles and a certainty of their anti-Semitism.

Hoffman has set herself a difficult task. But her book is not an apologia. It attempts something both grander and simpler, a conversation in a new key. Hoffman sets the two polities, Jews and Poles, next to each other in history, side by side. Over centuries. She marshals historical data against selective remembering, not against the individual memory of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale and elsewhere, but against the certitudes many of us have built chaotically, haphazardly over time, out of glimpses of documentary footage, anguished memoirs, wrenching historical fiction. Hoffman tries to understand and track the calamity of the Holocaust in the particular shtetl of Bransk in northeastern Poland. Before the war Bransk's population was more than 50 percent Jewish. Today, there isn't a single Jew left. How could one neighbor fatally turn his back on another?

In addition to her examination of history, Hoffman suggests that a handle with which to grasp the catastrophe would be “to see the story of Polish-Jewish coexistence as a long experiment in multiculturalism avant la lettre”—an experiment that obviously failed dismally. At a time of intense local hatreds in ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the former Soviet Union, Ireland and even Canada, Hoffman attempts to understand one of the modern age's most infamous and searing hatreds. One can't but admire her.

Her story of Bransk is almost ethnographic in the prosaism of its details and in its often deadpan presentation. Gone is the edginess and poetry of Lost in Translation, almost as if imagination were subsumed here in passionate intent. Bransk is about 180 kilometers east of Warsaw, near the Belarus border. It's not clear why Hoffman selected this town, although in the first line of her acknowledgments she thanks Marian Marzynski, the director of Shtetl, a 1996 Frontline documentary about Bransk. There is quite a bit of overlap in the territory covered by the film and the book, but there is a fundamental difference: The film leaves one with the impression that Poles were and still are anti-Semites. Perhaps this conclusion is what inspired Hoffman to write her book.

In a compact 258 pages she gives us the history of life in this town over 400 years. She attacks no one. There is no polemic here. Methodically she builds her case with specifics about the shared life of Jews and Poles. She searches for what went wrong.

They were fundamentally different peoples. The Poles were mostly peasants, the Jews tradespeople and artisans. And the Poles were Catholic. “The peasants were bound to the land as firmly as the Jews were tied to religion, and their day, week, and year were marked by the demands of working their farms and tending their animals, as the Jewish calendar was marked by religious signposts.” But there they were, standing next to each other at the market-place, at the tailor's, at the inn. They didn't call on each other socially, they certainly didn't marry and they never stepped into the other's houses of worship. But willy-nilly they learned a little of each other's languages and gestures, jokes and music. They conversed. Yet they existed “below the level of meaningfulness” to one another. They did not know each other.

Hoffman powerfully shows the importance of Poland to Jews. Nowhere else on the European continent did Jews create as rich a culture. This is where Yiddish society flourished, the language, the literature, Hasidism, the Bund, Zionism. It's no coincidence that the faux Philip Roth in the wacky and brilliant Operation Shylock wanted to round up the Ashkenazic Jews in Israel and bring them back to Poland.

“Unlike other minority groups, Jews had no wish to assimilate. … they wanted, above all, to preserve their identity intact and unaltered. … Quite exceptionally, the Jews in Poland were pressed into neither exile nor assimilation,” Hoffman says. This remarkable circumstance enables us to understand that the Jews both thrived in Poland and also remained so separate that their Polish neighbors didn't know or care about them. They could turn their backs when the Germans demanded it. Not every Pole, but most. And the Jews played their part in this not-knowing. “Both nations,” writes Hoffman, “had their syndromes of superiority. … The impact of Polish prejudices was perforce far more injurious to the Jews than vice versa. … But Jewish separatism was also an active choice.” At their friendliest, there was a condescension expressed in each's language: “our Jews,” “our goyim.”

Her analysis of the tragedy is simple and eloquent: “the two communities were mutually impenetrable.” They never took each other in. This may seem naïve, too psychological, even spiritual, but Hoffman is in the good company of, among others, the Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote that no one can obey the injunction “You shall not kill” unless the Other is regarded as an equal. One must look into the eyes of the Other in order not to do harm. “The banal fact of conversation,” wrote Levinas, “quits the order of violence. … To speak, at the same time as knowing the Other, is making oneself known to him. … I not only think of what he is for me, but also and simultaneously … [what] I am for him.”

As Hoffman sees it, this is precisely what Poles and Jews could not do. And this in her opinion spelled the doom of the Jewish peoples of Poland and, ultimately, of Europe. How could they arrive at a common good if they could not even look at each other?

It's the most ordinary of psychological strategies to bind up one's most complex and troubling emotions and maneuver them into a single narrative line, held in place like the rectangles in a Mondrian painting. So a reader will finish a sentence in Shtetl, a paragraph, a page, and just when she begins to doubt her certainties, they'll freeze up on her again. She'll read, “After all, for about six hundred years Poland was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the world. … Jews were a highly visible and socially significant presence—a constituency that had to be reckoned with.” Poland couldn't have been that bad for the Jews. She nods her head thoughtfully, but then thinks: All Poles are anti-Semites; they worked willingly, joyously in the camps. Each and every one of them. She doesn't want the messiness of Hoffman's balancing act. Sadly she remembers Primo Levi's words: “I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist … and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation.”

Hoffman is the product of other histories besides the Holocaust. That's why she could write this book. She knew she was Jewish and “that's why everyone died in the war.” And as a child she was obsessed with death. She counted her breaths. But Poland is also her childhood Eden. She calls the first part of Lost in Translation “Paradise.” She relishes the narrow mysterious streets of Krakow, summers in the foothills of the Tatry Mountains. Then she comes to North America and makes a life first as an immigrant child, then as a Harvard-educated intellectual and writer. She becomes an editor at The New York Times Book Review.

In 1977 Hoffman returned to Poland briefly for the first time and in 1990 and 1991 made lengthier visits. She has many friends there, evidently a vivid and affective life. One assumes she has written Shtetl for many reasons. But au fond, it seems to me, she wants to set her ancient world right. It's her home. She obviously can't live with mere hatred. Nor should we.