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Spanning several continents and nearly a century, Kalisz is the chronicle of the long diaspora of a family of Polish Jews. Moyshe and Raizel Berner are a pious couple raising a family in Tulizkow, Poland, when the First World War breaks out. Forced from their shtetl by anti-Semitic neighbors, the Berners join other Jewish families making a migration to a much larger, hopefully more tolerant city. The Berners find peace in Kalisz, where they thrive as merchants and tradesmen, and continue to grow. Their learned, faithful children have begun to marry, and provide grandchildren, when the outbreak of World War Two abruptly fractures the Berner family. Alex, the youngest, after a harrowing sojourn in Israel, settles in Australia. Half a century later, his daughter recapitulates his journey in reverse, hoping to solve her personal problems by recovering her family's lost history.
Rosalind Brenner has collected a wealth of cultural artifacts with which to furnish her convincing narrative of Jewish life. The early pages of the book, about the Berners' tribulations in the shtetl, are packed with italicized yiddishisms and charming phrases that will be unfamiliar to anyone not from New York City or the ghettoes of early 20th century Eastern Europe. The exodus the Berners subsequently make, one that thousands of other Jews made, during the interwar years, from small villages to large cities in search of economic opportunity and an escape from increasing anti-Semitism, is historically accurate. For anyone interested in this period and milieu, Brenner's research adds up to a book of impressive historical documentation.