Intriguing characters and surprising turns fill this collection of tales from old Poland.

"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--

Vivid retellings of six old tales, including one about a jolly tailor who climbed a ladder to the sky and sewed the clouds shut to stop the rain and one about a Flamebird who stole a golden apple from the king.

"Thousands of Russian Jews fleeing Tsarist persecution in the late 19th/early 20th centuries reached East Prussia through the Russian-Polish town Grajewo - a major illicit land crossing for waves of political, religious and economic emigrés. The 1870s rail link connecting Great Russia to Germany though Grajewo had created this East-West commercial junction. Hirsch Bieler, born 1900 in Grajewo, was among them. The Great War, begun at his doorstep, launched his journey to three Promised Lands. In 1919 teenage Hirsch left Poland forever for Leipzig in Weimar Germany. There he found a new home through 'adult adoption' by a childless Lutheran couple; community among other Zionist-leaning Eastern European Jews; a rich cultural life; and an entrepreneurial career in the rising petroleum trade. In 1931 he married Anna Burstein, a talented young Romanian concert pianist. That life was upended by Hitler's 1933 rise to power. In 1936 the couple fled with their small daughter - first, to Tel Aviv, then to America, overcoming onerous "Papers, please" barriers as world doors slammed shut for those seeking refuge. Meanwhile Soviet occupation, Nazi invasions and the Holocaust trapped Hirsch's friends and family still in Europe, scattering others across continents. He saved their correspondence chronicling those desperate years. In 1978 Hirsch and Anna revisited Leipzig. He began sharing his formative experiences as teen smuggler, fur trader, and oil supplier to I. G. Farben with us: his daughter Nora Jean and son-in-law Michael. We transcribed his recollections. He revised and expanded them, still managing the Philadelphia industrial lubricants firm he founded, until his death in 1985. His colorful recollections, plus extensive research, the inherited contents of his secret steel "strong box," and materials shared by his Suwalski/Antman family, resulted in this book." - publisher

This collection of essays explores more than five centuries of Scottish-Polish interactions. It focuses on the two main moments of contact: the early modern experiences of Scottish pedlars, merchants, mercenaries and diplomats in the Polish-Lithuanian commonA--wealth and the Polish presence in Scotland during the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The latter period includes the Polish military presence in Scotland during World War II and the new Polish migration to Scotland after Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004. The book will be of interest to students and researchers who focus on the boom subject of early modern Scottish emigration to the European continent, and also to more general readers outside the scholarly community. It will be of value to the Polish community in Scotland and to anyone interested in the joint history of these two countries.