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Charlotte Kahn, a senior psychoanalyst and German-Jewish refugee, has written a thoughtful volume on an interesting subject: after the Holocaust, why have some Jews, for example, German-Jewish émigrés, Nazi concentration camp survivors, post-Holocaust Israelies and Russian and other refugees from Eastern Europe, chosen to live in Germany when other countries, historically less hostile and inhospitable to Jews, were options? Moreover, she wonders whether it is possible for Jewish culture to thrive and flourish in post-Holocaust Germany.
There is no simple let alone easy psychoanalytically informed answers to these questions, especially when we consider the very different socioeconomic and historical contexts and socio-intellectual realities that these divergent groups of Jews, 120,000 strong, come from and are steeped in. Kahn unfortunately does not draw sufficiently from the pertinent sociological and historical studies on this subject to help answer her questions. Nonetheless, she offers some useful psychological speculations based on the interviewing of the clusters of Jews mentioned above, as well as German non-Jews currently residing in Germany. As is always the case with such studies in which there was, as Kahn admits, no systematic data collection from a representative and statistically large enough sample, it is nearly impossible to make any meaningful generalizations about such a diverse sample of Jews: each person had come to live in Germany by way of a highly idiosyncratic