Three decades of research in the archives of the former Soviet Union has elicited a number of important findings about the history of Jews in eastern Europe and their complicated relationship to the Czarist-Russian and authoritarian-communist states. This research has also given rise to new perspectives on the nature of mass violence against Jews and other minorities in the so-called bloodlands of eastern Europe, especially in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine where victims and perpetrators often lived side-by-side as neighbors, and where the brutalizing effects of the German occupation were experienced most intimately by local Jewish and non-Jewish populations. The most recent contribution to the on-going narrative of east European and Baltic Jewry comes from the innovative scholarship of Anton Weiss-Wendt, whose latest book On the Margins, illustrates just how inapplicable some of the existing tropes are to describe the Jewish experience in Estonia. For instance, as he provocatively concludes in Chapter 7, “Within the context of the Holocaust, Estonia constitutes an exceptional case, ridden with paradoxes” (218).

On the Margins is no ordinary book. It is as much auto-ethnography and social commentary as it is historical inquiry. In an attempt to identify—rather than fill—gaps in the literature, the volume comprises nine essays as well as a substantive introduction, chronologically organized on the history and murder of Jews in Estonian from their arrival in Narva (Weiss-Wendt's hometown in eastern Estonia) during the Czarist period, to their murder during the war and the role of average Estonians and the Security Police in their genocide, as well as the prosecution of the perpetrators by the Soviets during the Cold War.

The introduction offers the reader both a scholarly rationale for the collection, as well as a personal account of Weiss-Wendt's own intellectual journey to become what he describes as a real “Jewish historian” with all its attendant demands, such as language acquisition, which he discovered he needed when he could not read the Hebrew script on the headstones in a Jewish cemetery. Like so many young people in the post-communist era, Weiss-Wendt discovered his family had a complicated ethnic past (Weiss-Wendt describes this sardonically as a “motely pedigree”). His paternal grandfather was culturally and linguistically German, but he was also Jewish and ideologically a committed communist. And, while discovery of his Jewish lineage did not lead to the author's conversion, it did send him down the path of discovery into the complicated history of Estonians, Jews, and the communist state. The nine chapters included in this volume embody that relationship.

Worth highlighting is Chapter 4, a stand-alone case study of Weiss-Wendt's paternal grandfather Helmut Weiss, a Jewish-German-communist, who when the Nazis came to power in 1933 found himself caught between a racial rock and an ideological hard place. In 1934, Weiss fled the racism of the Third Reich and the persecution of communists for his communist utopia only to discover the grass was not greener on the other side, ending up a victim himself of the Great Terror and spending the better part of two decades in a Soviet gulag. Ironically, it may have been the Stalinst terror of the 1930s that saved Helmut Weiss's life. Also worth noting is the concluding chapter on the place of Jews and the Holocaust in the memory of contemporary Estonians, which is as much social commentary as it is historical culmination. Not only Jewish history, but also the memory of Jewish history, Weiss-Wendt concludes, remained “on the sidelines” of the Estonian past (257).

What distinguishes this volume from other more traditional histories is the interconnectedness of the author and his personal context with his historical subject. Weiss-Wendt interweaves his own career trajectory and historical and social questions into the contemporary world of Estonia, the historiographical debates about the Final Solution in eastern Europe, and the roll of antisemitism in the history of Estonia and its collaboration with the German occupiers during the war. The result is a unique and compelling collection of essays that sometimes do not hold together, yet which if taken as a whole and read in the spirit for which they are intended, offer real insight and meaning into much neglected areas of Estonian, German, Soviet, and Jewish histories.