A well-organized resurrection of yet another lost memory of the Holocaust era.
A methodical chronicle of a once-thriving farming town in western Ukraine that was obliterated by the Nazis and resurrected by witnesses’ testimonies.
Bendavid-Val’s father grew up in Trochenbrod and emigrated as a young man, skirting the Holocaust, but the author craved to know more about the small town’s history. In 1997, he visited the area and spoke extensively to early survivors. While viewing the mass grave site, he encountered an elder who “had been waiting over fifty years for someone to ask him about it.” Bendavid-Val embarks on a journey through the history of the town, the setting for Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002). Trochenbrod was essentially a vibrant Jewish town, with a turn-of-the-century population of 1,600. Farming in the marshland was difficult, and the Czarist army demanded conscription. Many youths emigrated elsewhere, especially to America, although there was also a Zionist movement, and even a Catholic church built in the late ’20s, thanks to Polish Prince Radziwill. The town endured domination by the Polish, Soviets and Nazis, respectively, though since the last great war the villagers believed, naively, that the Germans presented a more tractable authority than the Russians. By June 1941, the Nazis had put in place a system of occupation, terror and murder. The anti-Jewish Ukrainian Nationalists working with the Germans assured the Jews’ destruction, and during a few days in August 1942, most of the 4,500 Jewish inhabitants were shot and tossed in pits. The author ends this heartfelt account with three testimonies by people who somehow escaped that fate (only 60 survived).
A well-organized resurrection of yet another lost memory of the Holocaust era.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-113-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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