The Reichmanns

by Anthony Bianco

Beginning in eighteenth-century rural Hungary, The Reichmanns illuminates the origins of the family and of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy. Bianco paints a vivid picture of this lost world of small Jewish villages and the entrepreneurial young men who built the initial Reichmann wealth. Unlike many other Jews - and unlike the Rothschilds, Warburgs, and other great Jewish families - the Reichmanns resisted assimilation, and they never modified their strict adherence to Jewish law. Some of the family relocated to Austria, and Bianco gives us a vibrant portrait of the Vienna of Freud's time, a bustling urban center that at first welcomed the Reichmanns but whose increasing anti-Semitism eventually forced them out. Fleeing the Nazis, the Reichmanns landed in Paris, and when it fell, they made a daring escape to North Africa. They settled in Tangier, the free-for-all International Zone characterized primarily by its utter absence of commercial. Restraints. There, among the Nazi agents and Allied spi