Summary of Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 My full name is Tony Robert Judt. I have two perspectives on my childhood. From one perspective, it was an utterly conventional, somewhat lonely, and very lower-middle-class London childhood of the 1950s. From another perspective, it was an exotic, distinctive, and therefore privileged, expression of mid-twentieth-century history as it happened to immigrant Jews from East Central Europe.

#2 My father’s father, Enoch Yudt, was a Jewish economic marginal in a state of permanent migration. He had no particular skill except selling, and not much of that. He got by on the black market between Belgium, Holland, and Germany in the 1920s. But things must have gotten a bit warm for him around 1930, because he had to move on.

#3 My father, who was from Belgium, had come to Ireland with his family in 1936. In 1936, his brother in London invited him to England. He left school at fourteen to work odd jobs. While my mother spent her late teens in London, she was far more English in her soul than my father, who had been born there.

#4 I was born in 1948 in East London. The first thing I remember is walking along Tottenham High Road. I have other memories of North London life, including looking at trucks and buses out of my parents’ bedroom window.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669397069

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

My full name is Tony Robert Judt. I have two perspectives on my childhood. From one perspective, it was an utterly conventional, somewhat lonely, and very lower-middle-class London childhood of the 1950s. From another perspective, it was an exotic, distinctive, and therefore privileged, expression of mid-twentieth-century history as it happened to immigrant Jews from East Central Europe.

#2

My father’s father, Enoch Yudt, was a Jewish economic marginal in a state of permanent migration. He had no particular skill except selling, and not much of that. He got by on the black market between Belgium, Holland, and Germany in the 1920s. But things must have gotten a bit warm for him around 1930, because he had to move on.

#3

My father, who was from Belgium, had come to Ireland with his family in 1936. In 1936, his brother in London invited him to England. He left school at fourteen to work odd jobs. While my mother spent her late teens in London, she was far more English in her soul than my father, who had been born there.

#4

I was born in 1948 in East London. The first thing I remember is walking along Tottenham High Road. I have other memories of North London life, including looking at trucks and buses out of my parents’ bedroom window.

#5

I grew up knowing about the Holocaust, but I did not understand it. I knew who Toni was, and why I bore her name, only later. My parents were not interested in raising a Jew, even though there was never any question of complete assimilation.

#6

I was not brought up Jewish, except for the fact that I was. I would go to my grandfather’s house on Friday evenings, and every Friday evening I would meet some of the Auschwitz survivors who would come to visit him.

#7

My family experienced a brief period of prosperity from 1957 to 1964, when my father was able to afford some comforts, including foreign travel. In 1960, we went to Germany thanks to an invitation from a former Danish au pair.

#8

The world that was bequeathed to me by my parents was the world that was shaped by Hitler. The twentieth century was shaped by intellectuals of both right and left, but it is clear that the story of the European Jews is an important element in the history of twentieth-century thought.

#9

The Jewish question was never at the center of my own intellectual life, or indeed my historical work. But it intrudes, inevitably, and with ever greater force.

#10

The Habsburg monarchy, the old Austrian empire, was the first place where people were openly discriminated against on the basis of their differences. However, people and cultures were utterly intertwined and indissolubly blended in the identity of this place.

#11

The history of European Jews is complicated, and it is difficult to define what makes a Jew a Jew. The Jews who lived in Vienna and Budapest were brought up to think of themselves as German, despite being from Eastern European backgrounds.

#12

The author met Nick Kaldor, a prominent Hungarian economist, in the early 1970s. He had grown up in interwar Hungary and thought of himself first and foremost as an educated member of the upper middle class. He had never acquired either identity.

#13

The Pale of Settlement, which was the area where the Russian Empire allowed Jews to live, was an inhospitable place for