Among Polish historians interested in Jewish issues there is a move away from topics solely concerned with the twenty years between the two world wars. Until recently research into Jewish history in Poland has concentrated mainly on the inter-war period and has merely scratched the surface of earlier times, especially the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Konrad Zieliński's book breaks this silence. The author focuses on the period of the First World War and its influence on the Jews living in the region of Lublin at the time, more specifically in the area under Austro-Hungarian occupation. A pertinent question would be how to extend this research to cover the area within the province of Lublin–Chełm that was under German occupation, particularly Podlasie. It would then be possible to compare the processes of development of national and political awareness among the Jews living under the two different occupying forces in the region of Lublin. It is worth noting that the Austro-Hungarian administration was decidedly more liberal than the German.

Zieliński bases his study on numerous sources from several dozen historical records found in archives in Warsaw, Lublin, Kraków, and Zamość. His research draws on an impressive number of memoirs and diaries (including some published in Yiddish and Hebrew in the memorial books of particular towns in the Lublin region), as well as on periodicals from the Lublin region, Galicia, and as far away as the Prussian sector of partitioned Poland. He has managed to reconstruct a detailed picture of Jewish life at the time, not only in large towns such as Lublin, Chełm, and Zamość, but also in the tiny shtetls about which very little has been written in either Polish or foreign historical studies. The diverse sources Zieliński uses complement one another to present a comprehensive picture of how the Jewish minority functioned in the region of Lublin during the First World War—a period of great change for this particular community.

The layout of the book is coherent, and includes graphs containing statistical, economic, sociopolitical, and cultural information on the Jewish inhabitants of the region. However, the reader does not feel overwhelmed by the volume of factual information the book contains, and wherever there are gaps in the source material, Zieliński does not hesitate to make his own comparisons and present his own hypotheses.