Jacob Rader Marcus, the doyen of American Jewish history, is credited with the statement ‘I would trade in all my theories for one new fact.’ No doubt historian Israel Oppenheim would concur with this viewpoint. Indeed, Oppenheim's Tenuat Heḥaluts bePolin, 1929-1939 is a magisterial compilation of data concerning the Polish Socialist Zionist youth movement known as Hechaluts [the Pioneer]. This 673-page Hebrew tome, the second volume of a continuing study, focuses on the early and middle 1930s, when Hechaluts enjoyed its greatest success. The author meticulously documents the cultural, ideological, and political development of that segment of Polish Jewish youth for whom Hechaluts offered a meaningful response to the adversity and uncertainty of the interwar period.

Oppenheim, the undisputed expert on Hechaluts, bases his study on a rich storehouse of hitherto neglected primary sources preserved in the Central Zionist Archives, the Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot Archives, the Kibbutz Hameuhad Archives, the Hashomer Hatsa'ir Archives, the Lavon Labour Institute Archives, the Moreshet Ben-Gurion Archives, the Israel Labour Party Archives, and the Jewish National Library. David Engel's assertion that ‘there is probably no newspaper, pamphlet, handbill, or collect10n of unpublished material having some bearing on this subject that [Oppenheim] has not examined’ is probably correct: see Engel's review of Oppenheim's The Struggle of Jewish Youth for Productivization: The Zionist Youth Movement in Poland in AJS Review, 17/1 (Spring 1992), 129. I hasten to add, however, that Oppenheim's encyclopaedic grasp apparently exceeds his analytic reach. For despite Tenuat Hehaluts bePolin's many worthy features-particularly the detailed narrative accounts of the senifei hechaluts [local pioneering chapters], kibbutzei hakhsharah [training farms], the influence of Palestinian sheliḥim [emissaries], and relations with the Histadrut [General Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine]-the work is marred by the lack of a clear and cogent methodological framework.

At the heart of this volume is Oppenheim's keen, virtually exclusive, interest in Hechaluts. Although the study painstakingly illustrates the ascendance of Hechaluts in the 1930s, it pays scant attention to the revolution which took place in Polish Jewish politics as a whole. That the country's economic misery, growing right-wing extremism, and increasingly virulent antisemitic climate had a profound impact on Polish Jewry is assumed but not sufficiently demonstrated by the author.