For more than 50 years the spa towns of Karlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad in West Bohemia became the middle points of Jewish summer life in Europe. Not only the bourgeoisie of Germany and Austria travelled there, many Chassidic, middle-class and even penniless Jews from Eastern Europe also went there to enjoy the spas. In the limited time and space of their sojourn – especially in the light of the intimate social climate of such a location – these very heterogeneous Jewish cultures developed unusual methods of perception and communication.Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff traces the cultural, literary and medical backgrounds that accompanied life in these temporary “Jewish loci”, from the beginnings in the late 1800s to their demise in the 1930s; from the idyllic paradise of health spas for the bourgeois masses to their being a haven for Jewish refugees driven from the Eastern parts of the Habsburg monarchy to Bohemia during World War I; from the first years of the Czechoslovakian Republic to when Karlsbad and Marienbad became the hubs for Zionist meetings and congresses. Through all these years the West Bohemian health spas changed their function several times but never forfeited the central role they played within Jewish summer life in Middle and Eastern Europe.weiterlesen