"The Jews merely hovered around its margins"

captain1 said:

Hello, I would like to understand from you what the sentence "The Jews merely hovered around its margins" means(what is the meaning):
"To the Poles, it was a war between Poland and Germany, and the Jews merely hovered around its margins".

Source: Double Memory: Poles and Jews after the holocaust/Piotr Wrobel.

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GoesStation said:

The author is asserting that Poles didn't think much about how Jews were affected by the war. I can you from close family experience that many surviving Poles somehow blamed the few surviving Jews for the devastation. I hope Wrobel discusses what happened to survivors who laboriously made it back from the camps to the place they had previously considered their home.

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captain1 said:

Thank you for your answer. And what does this [STRIKE]that[/STRIKE] mean[STRIKE]s[/STRIKE]: "merely hovered around its margins"?

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Charlie Bernstein said:

Which war was he refering to? It's interesting that he thinks getting murdered is a form of hovering around the margins.

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GoesStation said:

The author was writing about the Poles' attitude towards the Jews after WWII. I wouldn't try to glean anything about his own attitudes from a one-sentence quotation.

I don't know much about specific incidents my mother and grandmother encountered when they returned to Poland, but my mother wrote about how hostile many of the Poles were. She had expected they'd settle back home in Poland; instead, they got out as quickly as they could.

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