A fresh, significant contribution to Jewish history.
Saving cultural property was central to postwar Jewish identity and recognition.
Throughout World War II, Jewish leaders around the world became horrified that Nazi looting of books, manuscripts, Torah scrolls, ritual objects, and documents would annihilate Jewish culture in Germany and Eastern Europe. In meticulous detail, drawing on archival sources, memoirs, correspondence, and histories, Gallas, chief research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture, makes an impressive book debut with a comprehensive history of efforts to recover, identify, and restore artifacts of Jewish culture and scholarship. The process was complex and sometimes contentious, generating debates about how to define the “Jewish collectivity”—as constituted through “the collective experience of persecution,” religious affiliation, or by territorial boundaries; how to give legal recognition to that collectivity; where European Jewries and their sociocultural worlds could be revived; and where—and under whose auspices—recovered property should be housed. Gallas focuses on four individuals who took prominent roles in the efforts: political theorist Hannah Arendt; rabbi and scholar Salo W. Baron, who held the first professorship of Jewish studies at Columbia and came to believe that Jewish communities could never be re-established in Europe; archivist and historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the daughter of Polish immigrants; and philosopher Gershom Scholem, who championed an Israeli state as the only home for Jewish culture. Offering capsule biographies of these key figures and extended examination of their efforts, Gallas notes that they “differed fundamentally in terms of their generation, background, self-image, and political vision” but “regarded their shared rescue mission as an existential duty.” All contributed actively to Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., the most significant of many such organizations devoted to compiling detailed data about the recovered material. The result, writes the author, “was tantamount to the creation of an archive of documentation and remembrance.” Their work was imbued with emotion: “The smell of death,” Dawidowicz said, emanated from hundreds of thousands of books and objects, “orphaned and homeless mute survivors of their murdered owners.”
A fresh, significant contribution to Jewish history.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-3395-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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