From the outset, this collection promises something different than a typical compilation of scholarly essays. The eleventh volume of Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte, Kultur und Museumswesen, entitled Displaced in Austria: Jewish Refugees since 1945/Displaced in Österreich: Jüdische Flüchtlinge seit 1945, brings together essays and interviews that explore the “traces” of the history of Jewish displaced persons (DP) in Austria, including several photographic collections and projects supported by the Jewish Museum Vienna. The overarching goal of the volume is an exploration and, perhaps even more so, an illumination of Austria's longer twentieth-century history as a transit hub and “waiting room”—a key thread that runs through the essays—for refugees who have moved on to new homelands (11).

The essays hone in on Jewish persons from East-Central Europe, the Soviet Union, and Iran classified as refugees and displaced persons from the end of World War II up through the 2000s. The focal point of several of the pieces is photographic collections acquired by the Jewish Museum. For example, Christine Oertel's “Displaced Persons—A Little-Known Aspect of Austrian Contemporary History: Kurt Bergmann's Photo Collection,” provides a historical sketch of Austria's place in the postwar history of Jewish displacement and a discussion of the photographic collection of Kurt Bergmann, a Viennese Jewish man, who obtained photographs of Jewish life in Austrian Displaced Persons Camps in Upper Austria and Salzburg. This essay also includes a meditation on photographs as historical sources.

Following this up is Susanne Rolinek's survey of Jewish DP camps in Salzburg (city and province). Setting her discussion against the backdrop of Salzburg's contemporary identity as a mountain retreat, Rolinek's essay is intended to recover the little-known history of the region as a hub of migration. Danielle Spera's essay examines the post–World War II history of the Rothschild Hospital DP camp through the lens of photographs taken by Henry Ries, a German-Jewish photographer who had emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s and returned to Europe as a New York Times photographer in 1945. Spera emphasizes the concept of often waiting and preparing for a new life, frequently in unpleasant conditions. This theme of waiting is also taken up in the essay concerning the photographs of Wolf Schärf, who had been commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to photograph life in Vienna DP camps. The final piece on the postwar period is Sandra Knopp's survey of DP newspapers as expressions of refugees’ political concerns and angst regarding the conditions of their temporary homes in Austria, as well as the utility of papers as representations of a reaction to censorship that had defined the lives of many in the years preceding their flight. Brief interviews with historians who specialize in the analysis of these camp papers are included in the piece.

The final four essays pivot away from the immediate postwar period, offering fleeting glimpses of Jewish migration set fully against the backdrop of the Cold War context. Béla Rásky's essay considers mass Hungarian Jewish migration following the failure of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary. Leading with a poem by György Faludy entitled “Exodus,” Rásky centers his discussion on the deficit of knowledge about the specific conditions Hungarian Jewish ’56-ers, who were perhaps 10 percent of the nearly 200,000 Hungarians who fled. He also addresses the reactions this distinct group of refugees had to returning, even temporarily, to Austria little more than ten years after the Shoah. Rásky also picks up briefly on the challenges faced by people as they worked to find a usable identity in their new homelands.

Ruth Orli Moshkovitz's helpful explanatory essay on Soviet Jewish migration through Austria in the 1970s and 1980s provides insight on the pivotal role that Austria played in advocating and negotiating on behalf of asylum seekers. Moshkovitz's essay reminds the reader of the diverse group of actors involved in resettlement, making an explicit connection to contemporary debates concerning global migration. This piece is followed by an interview conducted by Werner Hanak-Lettner with Russian-born writer and activist Masha Gessen, who spent time in Vienna as a refugee in 1981 and who was also a friend of the late Svetlana Boym, who was leading a project for the Jewish Museum Vienna. Gessen describes her experiences in the Dreherstrasse camp, which she likens to a prison, while also exploring her relatively “privileged” experience in comparison with those of contemporary refugees (149). The final essay by Dan Fischman takes on the story of Iranian Jewish refugees in Vienna in the 1980s as they waited to immigrate to the United States. He also discusses the work of the Rabbis Michoel and his father Schmuel Pressburger did to help prepare them for their new lives in the United States.

Given its accessible prose and dual-language format, this collection effectively and engagingly blurs the boundaries of scholarly and public history. Moreover, its extensive use of new photographic acquisitions adds an extraordinary visual element to the neglected histories of Jewish displacement in Austria. Yet this historical recovery is somewhat dissatisfying on two fronts. First, despite the discussion of photographs as important but challenging historical sources by Oertel, their use throughout book is problematic in that the interpretations of images offered do not seem to match the analytical rigor required of such sources. The provenance of captions is unclear and references to the photo subjects’ state of mind in the text lack clear sourcing. The second issue is that although we see clearly the faces voices of persons displaced in Austria in the pages of this book, we rarely hear their voices. The discussion of DP papers and the interview with Gessen are exceptions, and, as Oertel rightly questions, is a photo really worth a thousand words (44)? Despite these weaknesses, Displaced in Austria, which was published at the height of the European migration crisis in 2015–16, makes an important contribution to both historical and contemporary conversations about public memory and refugee policy in Austria, as well as to broader discussions concerning the meanings and challenges of uprootedness.