"Author Emily Rose grew up looking at two large oil portraits hanging above the fireplace mantel in her grandfather's home in New York City. Her Jewish ancestors had immigrated to America from Germany in 1857, and no one in the immediate family had any knowledge about the portraits that previously had hung for over a century in the home of distant relatives in a small south German village.".

"The paintings led Rose on a five-year journey to discover her heritage and the lost world of rural Germany. In the course of her research she uncovered a rich trove of documents, images, facts, and stories that paint a vivid picture of daily life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.".

"Although recent books describe life in the shtetls in eastern Europe as well as in major cities of central Europe, never before has a book chronicled the experience of Jews living in the German countryside during this period. In addition to the text there are over seventy-five black and white illustrations, a guide for researchers, maps, and bibliography."--BOOK JACKET.