"A beautifully written, extremely moving, and brilliantly researched work. It is, on one level, a biography of Werner Scholem, whose odyssey through the Weimar Republic ultimately led to his death in 1940. But it is also the story of two brothers-the Communist, Werner, and Gershom, the committed Zionist and great Kabbalah scholar. Finally, it is a cultural history of German Jewry and the interwar Left in all its varieties. Mirjam Zadoff rightly concludes that there is no way to separate these strands, which all come together in this extraordinary book."

Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

"[A] rich, eminently readable and multilayered biography that does justice not only to the intimate personal details of a neglected life but, in doing so, lights up broad contours of German history from the Kaiserreich through Nazism and beyond."

<i>The Times Literary Supplement</i>

"This biography is a major contribution to German-Jewish Studies and to the history of German Communism in the 1920 and 1930s. The tone is sober, the approach factual rather than interpretative, allowing a great deal of ground to be covered and a rounded portrait to emerge… Zadoff’s biography, which has been fluently translated by Dona Geyer, is a fitting work of restitution for a life cut short unjustly."

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies