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THEODOR HERZL

Name: THEODOR HERZL
Author: Derek Penslar
ISBN: 978-0-300-18040-4

THE CHARISMATIC LEADER

by Derek Penslar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020

Comprehensive reading, travel, and imagination form a firm foundation for this swift, focused biography.

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The compelling story of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), one of the primary leaders of the Zionist movement. Penslar, who teaches Jewish history at Harvard, reveals with thorough research and bright clarity that Herzl was an astonishing talent and a striking physical specimen with a resonant voice. He became a journalist for the Neue Freie Presse, “the most prestigious newspaper in Austria-Hungary,” as well as a successful novelist and playwright; Penslar summarizes much of that work—sometimes excessively so. After reviewing Herzl’s youth, the author focuses on his growing passion for Zionism, rise to fame, access to the principal players in European and Middle Eastern politics, and creation of political groups that elevated Zionism in the world’s consciousness. In 1949, Herzl’s remains were moved from Vienna to Israel, where Mount Herzl now rises over western Jerusalem, featuring the national cemetery. Penslar portrays his subject as a gifted and popular journalist who eventually became the paper’s literary editor and who managed to write prolifically despite his growing commitment to Zionism and the requirements of family. The author paints a painful picture of Herzl’s fraught relationship with his wife, Julie. (It was her family money that funded the freedom Herzl enjoyed.) Penslar also shows that Herzl was not a practicing Jew. Instead, he saw the various threats to Jews in Europe and looked for a place that might accept a mass immigration. He “fashioned himself as a certain kind of Jew—a member of a nation, yet liberal, cosmopolitan, and outward-looking; non-religious but respectful…proud to identify as a Jew in the face of ridicule and hatred.” Although Herzl didn’t live to see his dream realized, he has become a cultural icon—though, as the author notes, his fame is fading among the Israeli young. Penslar does not neglect Herzl’s problems, including a passion for the spotlight. Comprehensive reading, travel, and imagination form a firm foundation for this swift, focused biography.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-18040-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2020

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BORN SURVIVORS

THREE YOUNG MOTHERS AND THEIR EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF COURAGE, DEFIANCE, AND HOPE

by Wendy Holden ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2015

An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...

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The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.

Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”

An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.

Pub Date: May 5, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015

Categories:

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by Patricia Gucci with Wendy Holden

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by Sheila Escovedo with Wendy Holden

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TOMBSTONE

THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL

by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.

The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.