A revealing glimpse into the lives of six German Jews and their motives for lingering on in Nazi Germany. From a wide ``archival diaspora'' of letters, diaries, and other documents, Dippel, an editorial consultant, pieces together the lives of six leading, but very different, German Jews who passed up every opportunity to leave Nazi Germany before 1939; the study is an attempt to suggest why the majority of German Jews, despite legal and physical assaults, did not flee that nation. Dippel follows both the private and very public lives of his six subjects. Rabbi Leo Baeck represents German Jewry's religious and political leadership. We watch this proponent of interfaith dialogue as he slowly comprehends that the Jews' position in Germany is untenable. Finally broken, he is dragged off to the camps (which he survives), after asking the Gestapo for an extra minute to pay his gas bill. Journalist Robert Weltsch discovers Zionism, remains dedicated to showing German Jews that Palestine will play ``a central role in Jewish life,'' and ultimately sees the fractured community accept his thesis that Jews, too, are a volk with a ``fatherland.'' Nobel Prizewinning chemist Richard Willstatter develops the gas mask, screens himself from reality in his scientific ivory tower, and survives only because of a miraculous escape. Society columnist Bella Fromm socializes with diplomats and top Nazis to save hundreds of refugees and then manages, barely, to save herself. Financier Max Warburg also grows from a hedonistic German into a heroic, defiant Jew who sacrifices much so that many others can escape before him. Only Jewish fascist Hans-Joachim Schoeps (``no one can tear Germany out of our hearts'') conforms to the pathological profile that we so glibly confer on those determined to deny reality and their own identity. This dramatic, multidimensional history adds much-needed depth to our understanding of the enigmatic German-Jewish community that dallied with Hitler.
Pub Date: April 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-09103-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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