Generations »

GENERATIONS starts with the author's overview of Polish/Jewish interactions over a thousand years from the times of Ibrahim ibn Yakub, a Jewish traveler-merchant-diplomat from Arab Spain, who in 965 A.D. was the first to mention a town called Kracko and continuing all the way to the Holocaust. It then proceeds from pre-historic legends to historic details about Krakovian Jewish courtiers serving the King Casimir the Great in 1350 and the Polish Renaissance Queens Elizabeth of Bohemia and Bona Sforza around 1500, all at the royal court in Kraków.

The major part of the book deals with the history of Kraków Jewry as illuminated by the specific lives and genealogy of the author's Aleksandrowicz forebears and their friends and neighbors. It ends with the author's experiences as a child in Kraków (1925-1943) and his survival in the Ghetto, the concentration camps in Plaszów, Mauthausen, Melk and Ebensee. The book is the result of 11 years of research.

It contains a number of copies of original historic family documents written in archaic Polish, which the author transcribed and translated into English, scores of other documents and photographs, a bibliography and an index.