A fine and deeply affecting work of history and memoir

This poignant journey of discovery provides some profound insights into how hatred can be incited and manipulated to destroy communities, and is all too relevant to what is happening in the region today.

extraordinarily moving ... Though he has been thinking about the story and researching it for decades, the writing feels immediate. The book is part memoir, part history lesson about 'old Europe' as a battleground between four empires, and part lament for the lost world of European Jewry. Perhaps the most valuable thing about it for British readers is its reminder of how lucky we are to have welcomed refugees to our shores and not to have exported them. Wasserstein has a deep understanding of places where borders have violently changed every couple of generations and whole populations have been massacred as a result of ideology, religion or whim.

This formidable book takes pride of place among the growing corpus of literature coming out of the swampy bloodlands. If you want to understand why hate has been unleashed again in Europe, this is the indispensable guide

Using the lens of his own family's betrayal, Bernard Wasserstein's A Small Town in Ukraine revisits one of the country's darkest moments ... revelatory and dramatic ... [a] noble, nicely detailed enterprise of historical and familial recovery

he employs a microscope to portray the fates of many through an account of very few. Near the scene of his grandparents' murder, he found a memorial to Ukrainian nationalists executed by the Russians after the Second World War more prominent than a plaque commemorating the vastly larger number of dead Jews, "as if to assert that Ukrainians, not Jews, were the true victims of this history and would have the last word". His anger is just, his book a finer monument than any plaque.

This is a deeply moving book, beautifully written, all the sadder now that refugees are again trudging those same roads.

a compelling history, which pays tribute to his ancestors while raising issues that remain tragically relevant today ... alongside this touching personal material, Wasserstein's book vividly traces how what was once a Polish town became 'a predominantly Jewish one' by around 1800 and is 'now almost entirely Ukrainian'. ... among its many other virtues, this book is a sharp reminder of the dangers of turning history into a simplistic morality tale

The personal thread of his own family's experiences lends warmth and tragedy to the facts that he meticulously documents. ... succeed[s] in putting a human face to the suffering of ordinary people trapped in the turmoil of physical conflict and political ideologies ... steadfastly refuse[s] to airbrush the past

We believe that we think with our minds. But a part of us - a deep and important part - thinks with the blood. Our sense of self is deeply entwined with the places we came from and the people who formed us. ... For the historian Bernard Wasserstein, that origin story includes the violence, injustice and trauma suffered by his family at the hands of the Nazis. But A Small Town in Ukraine is more than just a family biography. It is Wasserstein's attempt not just to chronicle the suffering experienced by his parents and grandparents but also to understand it. His method is to examine, in minute and forensic detail, the history of the place from which they came, the small town of Krakowiec - 'a little place, you won't have heard of it', as his father used to say. ... Wasserstein offers an evocative and detailed portrait of the world that formed his grandfather's and ancestors' lives. ... his book is a moving chronicle of a lost world, written with eloquence and emotional intelligence but without bitterness

Laura Freeman has more than done her subject justice. It is a complicated story, lucidly told and neatly illustrated

Over the many years that I've been visiting Kettle's Yard, it's as if the place has become a dear friend; now with this beautifully constructed book I am able to meet the man whose presence and artistic acuity can be seen in every room and in every careful juxtaposition of images. Wonderful!

A cabinet of curiosities... It tells the story of a life and a century

A triumph... Its exactly the right tone of thoughtful, critical affection... The witty sentences are fine things, illuminating and illumined, conveying the way light is bounced around Kettle's Yard as it shines from candlesticks and picture frames

A captivating biography

An extraordinary tale and could not have been told better or with more sensitivity. Her book will make anyone want to pay an immediate visit

A deeply researched book

Addictive from the get-go... Freeman is a deft storyteller

Freeman brings characters vividly to life on the page, recreating the lively circle that joined in Ede's many activities with sympathy and panache... Ways of Life conjures his spirit and continues his mission in style

Highly original… Admirers of that secular sanctuary will adore this book

A superb achievement ... a lucid, totally compulsive read from beginning to end, chilling as well as profoundly empathetic in tone

Utterly brilliant. This gripping account of East Germany sheds new light on what for many of us remains an opaque chapter of history. Authoritative, lively and profoundly human, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand post-WW2 Europe

A gripping and nuanced history of the GDR from its beginnings as a separate German socialist state against the wishes of Stalin to its final rapprochement with its Western other against those of Gorbachev. Beyond the Wall is a unique fresco of everyday reality in East Germany. Elegantly moving between diplomatic history, political economy and cultural analysis, this is an essential read to understand not only the life and death of the GDR but also the parts of it that still survive in the emotions of its former citizens.

Superb, totally fascinating and compelling, Katja Hoyer's first full history of East Germany's rise and fall is a work of revelatory original research - and a gripping read with a brilliant cast of characters. Essential reading

A beyond-brilliant new picture of the rise and fall of the East German state. Katja Hoyer gives us not only pin-sharp historical analysis, but an up-close and personal view of both key characters and ordinary citizens whose lives charted some of the darkest hours of the Cold War. If you thought you knew the history of East Germany, think again. An utterly riveting read

A fantastic, sparkling book, filled with insights not only about East Germany but about the Cold War, Europe and the forging of the 20th and 21st centuries

The joke has it that the duty of the last East German to escape from the country was to turn off the lights. In Beyond the Wall Katja Hoyer turns the light back on and gives us the best kind of history: frank, vivid, nuanced and filled with interesting people

A refreshing and eye-opening book on a country that is routinely reduced to cartoonish cliché. Beyond the Wall is a tribute to the ordinary East Germans who built themselves a society that - for a time - worked for them, a society carved out of a state founded in the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism

A colourful and often revelatory re-appraisal of one of modern history's most fascinating political curiosities. Katja Hoyer skilfully weaves diverse political and private lives together, from the communist elite to ordinary East Germans

Katja Hoyer is becoming the authoritative voice in the English speaking world for all things German. Thanks to her, German history has the prominence in the Anglosphere it certainly deserves.

Katja Hoyer brilliantly shows that the history of East Germany was a significant chapter of German history, not just a footnote to it or a copy of the Soviet Union. To understand Germany today we have to grapple with the history and legacy of its all but dismissed East

Katja Hoyer's return to discover what happened to her homeland - the old East Germany - is an excellent counterpoint to Stasiland by Anna Funder