This, too, is for the best

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This book, a graceful narrative interweaving fact and fiction, presents nineteenth-century German-Jewish history as seen through the eyes of Simon Kraemer, a Bavarian school-teacher and author whose previously unknown works emerge as valuable pieces of social and cultural history. Using material from his memoirs, his stories, and documents in the German archives, Julia Wood Kramer illustrates three of the major conflicts lacing Simon Kraemer's generation: the struggle for civil rights, the desire for German culture, and the resulting need to redefine Judaism and Jewish life. Moving from this larger world to the smaller world of Kraemer and his family, the author focuses on the poignant emotions surrounding Kraemer's sense of loss of a personal identity for himself, his children emigrating to America, and his fellow Jews, producing a work that is enlightening as well as moving.