Yellow Star - Red Star is the poignant memoir of Dr Agnes Kaposi, a Hungarian-born British engineer, educator, author and Holocaust survivor.
Dr Agnes Kaposi FREng was born in Hungary in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power. She started school at the outbreak of World War II. Many of her family and friends were murdered in the Holocaust, together with half a million other Hungarian Jews, but a series of miracles and coincidences allowed her to survive. She worked as a child labourer in the agricultural and armament camps of Austria and was liberated by a rampaging Soviet Army. She struggled through post-war hardship to reenter Hungarian society, only to be caught up for a decade in the vice of Stalinism. In 1956, the Hungarian revolution offered the opportunity to escape. Entering Britain as a graduate engineer, she started a family and built a career as a researcher, educator and consultant. She was the third woman to become a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Her memoir is thoroughly researched but written with compassion and optimism, without self-pity. The tone is light and there is plenty of irony and even humour. The narrative is underscored by the historian Dr László Csősz and illustrated by maps, documents, archival images and family photographs. This book goes beyond the recollections of a survivor — it is an appeal to all of us to fight against prejudice and for human rights.
In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, by Martin Gilbert.
From the book jacket…
In this absorbing and eloquent book Martin Gilbert presents a fascinating account of hope, opportunity, fear and terror that have characterised the relationship between Jews and Muslims through the 1,400 years of their intertwined history.
‘Marin Gilbert’s outstanding In Ishmael’s House is essential reading.’
— Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph
‘Gilbert’s scholarship is meticulous, his tone balanced, and he takes care to include painstaking details.’
— London Evening Standard
‘A nonstop barrage of compelling facts from a breathtakingly wide collection of archives, to build up an overwhelming portrait of a people’s suffering.’
— The Sunday Times
‘Gilbert explores the relationship between Jews and Muslims from the seventh century to the present day. A valuable, balanced contribution.’
— The Times
‘This account of the slow burning tragedy of the extinction of Jewish communities in the Arab world is moving and important. It should be read.’
— Independent
Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, by Harry Ostrer.
From the publisher…
Who are the Jews — a race, a people, a religious group? For over a century, non-Jews and Jews alike have tried to identify who they were — first applying the methods of physical anthropology and more recently of population genetics.
In Legacy, Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and authority on the genetics of the Jewish people, explores not only the history of these efforts, but also the insights that genetics has provided about the histories of contemporary Jewish people. Much of the book is told through the lives of scientific pioneers. We meet Russian immigrant Maurice Fishberg; Australian Joseph Jacobs, the leading Jewish anthropologist in fin-de-siècle Europe; Chaim Sheba, a colorful Israeli geneticist and surgeon general of the Israeli Army; and Arthur Mourant, one of the foremost cataloguers of blood groups in the 20th century. As Ostrer describes their work and the work of others, he shows that to look over the genetics of Jewish groups, and to see the history of the Diaspora woven there, is truly a marvel. Here is what happened as the Jews migrated to new places and saw their numbers wax and wane, as they gained and lost adherents and thrived or were buffeted by famine, disease, wars, and persecution. Many of these groups — from North Africa, the Middle East, India — are little-known, and by telling their stories, Ostrer brings them to the forefront at a time when assimilation is literally changing the face of world Jewry.
A fascinating blend of history, science, and biography, Legacy offers readers an entirely fresh perspective on the Jewish people and their history. It is as well a cutting-edge portrait of population genetics, a field which may soon take its place as a pillar of group identity alongside shared spirituality, shared social values, and a shared cultural legacy.
‘We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes’
Theodor Herzl’s passionate advocacy of the founding of a Jewish state grew out of his conviction that Jews would never be assimilated into the populations in which they lived. Herzl concluded that the only solution for the majority of Jews would be organised emigration to a state of their own.
Herzl’s political and social plea was the result of centuries of restrictions, hostility and pogroms against the Jews of Europe. His revolutionary proposal for the solution to anti-Semitism was a Jewish state, where Jews could live in peace, free from persecution - and this hugely influential essay led directly to the creation of Israel.
