In 1936, Joseph Margoshes (1866-1955), a writer for the New York Yiddish
daily Morgen Journal, published a memoir of his youth in
Austro-Hungarian Galicia entitled Erinerungen fun mayn leben. In this
autobiography, he evoked a world that had been changed almost beyond
recognition as a result of the First World War and was shortly to be
completely obliterated by the Holocaust. In telling his story, Margoshes
gives the reader important insights into the many-faceted Jewish life of
Austro-Hungarian Galicia.We read of the Orthodox and the Enlightened,
urban and rural life, Jews and their gentile neighbors, and much more.
This book is an important evocation of an entire Jewish society and
civilization and bears comparison with Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk's masterful
evocation of Jewish life in Poland, Poyln.