On the Margins

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins fills this lacuna. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940-41 are but few issues addressed in the book. Most profoundly, the book wrestles with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia. Specifically, it examines the quasi-legal system of murder instituted in Nazi-occupied Estonia, confiscation of Jewish property, and Jewish forced labor camps. One the Margins develops an analysis of the causes of collaboration in the Holocaust and explains the dynamics of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union since the 1960s and so-called denaturalization trials in the United States in the 1980s. The haunting memory of Soviet and Nazi rule, the book concludes, prevents a larger segment of the Estonian population today from facing up to the Holocaust and the universal message that it carries.