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Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (review)

Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, Avinoam J. Patt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), xi þ 373 pp., cloth $54.95. In Finding Home and Homeland, Avinoam Patt asks why so many young Jews formed Zionist groups soon after liberation. He studies the large youth segment of the Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) population to determine what Zionism meant to these survivors, and how deeply influenced they were by the ideology. Finding Home and Homeland is organized into three parts. Part One focuses on Jewish survivors in postwar Germany in 1945 and on young survivors in postwar Poland. Part Two explores Jewish DPs in kibbutzim in postwar Germany between 1945 and 1947, as well as the agricultural training they received there. Part Three focuses on aliyah and the demands of citizenship. In his study, Patt draws on a variety of sources to infer the reasons for the DPs’ actions: records from DP social, cultural, and political organizations; DP camp newspapers; and diaries, letters, and testimonies. He demonstrates that Zionism was central to the formation of a postwar DP identity, particularly for those who found themselves in Germany, and that its appeal broadened as it seemed increasingly to offer the best answers to young Jews’ most pressing problems. For example, most young DPs soon realized that they had no family remaining and were largely on their own. As recent survivors of trauma and tragedy, they preferred to put their lives back together in a supportive environment in the company of fellow survivors. The early kibbutzim organized by camp survivors in Germany and the Zionist youth movements in Poland provided the warmth, camaraderie, shelter, and security they yearned for after the war. Patt argues that the Zionist ideological aspects of the kibbutz were secondary; by joining a kibbutz, DPs had access to education in Jewish and Zionist history. Zionism functioned for them therapeutically and productively by providing work and a sense of family—in short, a structure that empowered them to embrace a new national identity.