“Europe is just a graveyard for me,” my Shabbat host told me. The year was 1980, or about then. David was explaining why he had no desire to visit the continent where, as a boy, he had somehow survived. We sat in his Jerusalem living room. The shelves held 200 rare books in German, Hungarian and other languages—all that Czechoslovakia’s new Communist government had let him take from his family’s famous Prague bookstore when he left for Israel in 1949. Although he wouldn’t visit Graveyard Europe, he proudly showed me his clan’s place in its culture. His words resonated in...