NONFICTION - May 17, 1992

THE JEWISH WORLD OF YESTERDAY 1860-1938, edited by Rachel Salamander, translated from the German by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (Rizzoli: $65; 320 pp.) The human landscape depicted here in more than 400 sepia-toned photographs, so rich and so resonant, was literally obliterated by the Holocaust--and so the scenes of Jewish life in Central Europe before World War II strike us as something akin to the ruins of Pompeii. Still, the figures and settings describe the extraordinary vigor and diversity of Jewish civilization in Europe, from the streets of the shtetl to the salons of the intelligentsia, from the klezmer musicians and pushcart peddlers and sweatshop seamstresses to such luminaries as Einstein, Freud and Schoenberg. (Pictured here, for instance, is a young Arthur Koestler aboard the Graf Zeppelin on its flight over the North Pole.) Encyclopedic in scope, celebratory in tone, the book is a superb keepsake of a world that now exists only in myth and memory. At the same time, it is an anguishing reminder of the vivid human face of the men, women and children who are nowadays referred to as “the Six Million.”