This volume of Polin is a wide-ranging contribution to the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania and to developing an inclusive national narrative. It deals in depth with the specific character of Lithuanian Jewry; Lithuanian–Jewish relations; Vilna as the focus of Jewish life; the impact of the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and of the post-war Soviet reoccupation; the subsequent slow revival of Jewish life; and recent attempts to investigate the past and to accommodate the legacy of the Holocaust.

Jewish women's exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the East European Jewish past. As a result, the study of Jewish women in eastern Europe is still in its infancy. The fundamental task of historians to construct women as historical subjects, 'as a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative', has only recently begun. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the study of Jewish women's experiences in Eastern Europe. The guest editors for this volume are Paula Hyman of Yale University, a leading figure in Jewish women’s history in the United States, and ChaeRan Freeze of Brandeis University, author of a prize-winning study on Jewish divorce in nineteenth-century Russia. Their introduction provides a much-needed historiographic survey that summarizes the major work in the field and highlights the lacunae. Their contributors, following this lead, have attempted to go beyond mere description of what women experienced to explore how gender constructed distinct experiences, identities, and meanings. Among them, Shulamit S. Magnus analyses perhaps the best-known memoir written by an east European Jewish woman—Pauline Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Jewish Grandmother. Ellen Kellman explores the life of a prominent Jewish feminist whose activism was shaped by the devastating impact of the First World War. Moshe Rosman considers the question of whether Jewish women in eastern Europe had power. There are two chapters on the education of Jewish women in eastern Europe (Eliyana Adler, Carole Balin), and two on Jewish women who converted to Christianity (ChaeRan Freeze, Rachel Manekin). Tova Cohen considers how female authors writing in Hebrew encoded their gender concerns in their writing, while Ewa Plach demonstrates the concerns of cosmopolitan bourgeois and intellectual Jewish women. Her analysis of a Zionist women’s Polish-language feminist newspaper illustrates the heterogeneity of Polish Jewish womanhood and the hybrid nature of Jewish identity. In seeking to recover lost achievements and voices and place them into a broader analytical framework, this volume is an important first step in the rethinking of east European Jewish history with the aid of new insights gleaned from the research on gender.