In Finding Home and Homeland, Avinoam J. Patt, the Feldman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Hartford, has produced a carefully nuanced study of how young Jewish survivors of the Holocaust (ages 15 to 23) were prepared in the American Zone of Occupation in Germany, between 1945 and 1948, for meaningful agricultural work in Palestine and later Israel. Drawing heavily on rare archival holdings, including DP camp newspapers, now housed at Israeli and American archives, Patt demonstrates the important role that Zionism and the kibbutz movement played in providing a “psychological” surrogate family for stateless Jewish youth who by the end of the war had placed all of their future hopes on emigrating to Palestine.
This work, which originated as Patt’s NYU doctoral dissertation, provides an important new contribution to our understanding of how Jewish refugees adjusted to post-war conditions. It also provides an important, detailed complement to Deborah Dwork’s and Robert Jan van Pelt’s more popular Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933 – 1946, also published in spring 2009.
