In the first academic book to describe the life of poor Jews in Amsterdam between the two world wars, We Lived with Dignity captures in poignant detail the unique qualities of that city's Jewish ghetto before Hitler's reign of terror. Interviews with more than ninety survivors who shared memories of living conditions in the ghetto and their feelings about the tremendous changes they lived through create an oral history that has not previously been recorded in formal descriptions and archives.

The research in this book raises questions and challenges assumptions about what the past was like and how it can be portrayed. Selma Leydesdorff suggests that oral history may not always be an accurate measure.

Because memories about the period before the war are veiled by the massive slaughter of the Jews by the Germans, survivors often idealize their circumstances, burying under layers of romantic nostalgia the reality of hunger, poor housing, poverty and filth, unemployment, and a lack of social stability - precisely of the sort depicted in present-day literature about the old Jewish quarter.

She found that the processing of practically every interview, every "fact," involved a struggle between reality, distortion, and myth.

We Lived with Dignity contains more than people's stories. Leydesdorff confirms events, exposes the truth, and explains distortions by reference to other material. To bring order into the world she hears about, she frames her interviews with critical information including a summary of the historical, economic, and demographic relationships within which the Amsterdam Jewish proletariat lived; an explanation of the changes in living conditions and the conscious attempts that were made to help the Jews - a cultural and religious minority - adapt to what was regarded as "modern" or "progressive"; and a description of the culture of poverty, the strategies for survival that characterized it, and the apparent impossibility of escaping it.