Czernowitz, the former capital and main center of Bukowina, was an invisible city for a long time. Between 1998 and 2008, New York-based scholars Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer visited the region four times and included two trips to Transnistria, where thousands of Bukowinian Jews were deported after 1941. Through their work, they provide a remarkable and highly readable examination, from many perspectives, into the past and present of Czernowitz, a city often referred to as a provincial metropolis with a distinctly Central European character. Czernowitz is, though, mentioned more frequently as the home of Paul Celan, arguably the most important postwar German-speaking poet, who was born in 1920 into a Czernowitz Jewish community with a high level of German acculturation.

The preconditions for the growth of this special Jewish community were created during the era of Austrian rule. From the 1860s onward, Bukowina Jewry increasingly identified itself with German language and culture until, by the end of the nineteenth century, they had become its chief standard-bearers in the region. Today, however, following a tumultuous history on the chessboard of world politics, subject to sudden and brutal changes, the city's name is Chernivtsi, and it is part of Ukraine. Nevertheless, Czernowitz represented a microcosm of Jewish life in German-speaking Central Europe for more than 150 years and continues to symbolize the social, economic, and cultural rise and development of Judaism from the 1860s until the 1930s, its mental and political orientations (assimilation, acculturation, Zionism, and Yiddishism), and the intensity and tragedy of the German-Jewish symbiosis in the first half of the twentieth century.

The first visit in 1998, which inspired this book, was the only one undertaken with the authors' elderly parents and parents-in-law. Their parents/parents-in-law grew up in Czernowitz but were able to leave the city for Bucharest in the mid 1940s. They later immigrated to the United States. For them, it was a return to a home left behind more than five decades ago. For the authors, however, it was their first meeting with a place that had previously existed primarily through storytelling and parental memories of childhood and youth. Although the family ties were certainly one of the motivations behind the authors' decision to travel to Czernowitz, the journey differs, as Hirsch and Spitzer state in their introduction, “in significant respects from other second-generation ‘return’ journeys to old Jewish Eastern European towns.” The volume goes far beyond the scope of a typical family chronicle. Alongside personal encounters and interviews with survivors and contemporary witnesses of several periods of rule (Habsburg, Romanian, Soviet, and Ukrainian), the authors also rely on a variety of source materials: official and private documents, public and family archival materials, letters, memoirs, photographs, newspapers, essays, poetry, fiction, and Internet postings.

The ability to observe, evaluate, and contextualize habits and specific objects is one of the greatest strengths of this book. With the authors' presentation of each memory and object we only have to scratch the surface to reveal a palpable, moving history. In one scene, Lotte Hirsch (mother of Marianne Hirsch) walks through an apartment where she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life and recalls the location of the furniture. Two large tile heating stoves, for instance, were still there, and one of the stoves, where they used to bake cakes “when the bad times came” (Lotte Hirsch), she remembers well. This scene reveals the multidimensional meaning of particular everyday objects. The stoves “act as a medium of remembrance by invoking primal associations with home, comfort, security” (295), especially from the perspective of returnees who lost their homes as a result of war and occupation and eventually emigrated.

This narration demonstrates the historical, as well as memorial and postmemorial, dimensions of the authors' project. Furthermore, it highlights the role of descendants and their reaction to the memories of parents and grandparents and their past. Cultural and literary objects on the bookshelves of Rosa Roth Zuckerman's Czernowitz apartment (a relative of Marianna Hirsch, born in 1908), including books by German-Jewish Bukowina prewar and postwar writers—reminiscent of the Habsburg era—are “a testament not only to the vibrancy and persistence of Bukovina's distinct culture but also to its dispersal and dissolution.” These books, which found themselves later in homes in Romania and the United States, also seem to present an ideal starting point for scrutinizing the contradictions inherent in the authors' own ambivalent nostalgia for Czernowitz. They consequently lead to a question that is always fundamental for the children of exiles: “Where exactly are you from?”