A young Jewish boy—the old, much-fought-over city of Vilnius—the rumblings and then the reality of World War I—all combine in this book to create a striking historical document of a period during which Europe and the Western world were changed forever. In the streets and alleys of Vilnius actor Joseph Buloff came of age, learning the arts of shape-altering necessary for survival during successive occupations by Cossacks, Germans, Bolsheviks, and Poles; it is this fascinating vanished milieu that he brings to life in From the Old Marketplace.

For a little boy, the old marketplace was full of enchantment, a world in itself, and Buloff brilliantly describes the eccentric inhabitants who peopled his childhood: Berchick the orphan, Barve's son the intellectual and historian, the starveling Matzek, Arkashka the Cossack, Joseph's mother, the saintly yet practical Sarah, and his father, Benjamin, who made a fortune in America and lost it again in Europe.

The boy came to realize his own Jewishness when Russian persecution forced the Jews to make the synagogue the center of their world. He was driven by brutality, hunger, and ostracism to transform himself in spirit into the imaginary Chantille Jeantaigne Delacroix, scourge of evil, avenger of his people, Conqueror of Death. Joseph's accounts of daily life under unbelievably hard circumstances range from down-to-earth facts to soaring flights of fantasy—and his desperate acting in order to stay alive brought him his true vocation, first on the scrounging amateur stage and then in the professional theatre.

This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January 1944, was written under conditions of extreme danger by a Ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council. After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel.

The diary incorporates Avraham Tory’s collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when—if not simply carted off and murdered in a random “action”—Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory’s overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror.

Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory’s is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider’s view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert’s masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.