Publisher's Synopsis
How could you live in Vienna after the war? foreign audiences frequently, accusingly ask Leon Zelman when he delivers lectures abroad, and in After Survival, Zelman painfully comes to grips with that question.
Leon Zelman is proud of his dual identities—Viennese and Jewish—the latter by birth, the first by a tragic twist of fate and then by choice. His early attempts to emigrate to the U.S. thwarted by illness, Zelman gradually fell in love with Vienna, his adopted city. At the time, however, he longed for his beloved childhood home, the Polish shtetl Szczekociny, which, like prewar Vienna, was vibrant with Jewish history and culture until the Holocaust consumed it.
Zelman's memoir is about loss, but he places more emphasis on the life he found—or made for himself—after he survived the Lodz ghetto and a series of concentration camps as a young teenager. He has been instrumental in rebuilding a Jewish community in Vienna, in the midst of many wartime enemies. As a ""public"" Jew in Austria, he has walked a political tightrope and has a unique perspective on displacement and postwar politics—and here he relates his experiences with Bruno Kreisky, the World Jewish Congress, and Edgar Bronfman. Having hosted thousands of Jews through the Jewish Welcome Service, he continues to provide a bridge between the Jews (past and present) and new generations of Austrians by teaching and traveling.
