An ambitious, thoroughly accessible account of the so often unhappy fortunes of the Jewish people from the early modern era to the present.
In the late 18th century, writes Sachar (History/George Washington Univ.; Dreamland, 2002, etc.), many of the states and principalities of Europe were faced with a difficult decision: their rulers and peoples may have despised the much-maligned Jews hidden away by night in their prisonlike ghettoes, but they needed their “talent for producing liquid wealth” if their economies were to enter the modern age. Religious fanaticism was becoming a thing of the past, which cooled some of the anti-Semitic ardor of both Catholic and Protestant realms, and in the next few years Jews became able to travel freely, live where they wished and even attend public schools and universities—all quite astonishing changes, given past repression. Among the results were the rapid growth of a Jewish middle class, the arrival into France and Germany of a large population of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the dispersal of Jews to the New World; in the last regard, Sachar notes that whereas the British crown imposed plenty of restrictions on Catholics, “not a single law was enacted in British North America specifically to penalize Jews.” Elsewhere that was not true, and by the end of the 1800s, Pope Leo XIII was publicly supporting “the anti-Semitic movement as long as it is carried out in a legal fashion, as in Germany.” Sachar charts these changing sentiments, offering exact and lucid précis of such transformative events as the Dreyfus Affair and the rise of organized, officially ordained anti-Semitism across Europe (and, in response, the rise of Zionism). Moving from continent to continent over time, Sachar brings his account to the post-9/11 world, with anti-Jewish sentiment again on the rise in Europe thanks not only to homegrown fascists but also to an ever-growing Muslim population, itself marginalized.
An essential work of modern history: put it alongside Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers and Amos Elon’s more recent The Pity of It All.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41497-5
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
Categories: HISTORY | JEWISH | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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