A powerful recounting of a little-known story.
Holocaust-related history, more uplifting than most.
Freelance writer Duffy stumbled upon a stray reference to “Forest Jews” while performing a random online search. His curiosity about this mysterious term led to a New York Times story in 2000, now this book. The eponymous brothers are Tuvia, Asael, and Zus Bielski, all born before WWI to the only Jewish family in Stankevich, western Belarus. Once a dominion of czarist Russia, the village became part of Poland after 1918, but the Soviet Union governed following the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. The intense drama of Duffy's narrative begins with Nazi German troops over-running the village in 1941. The Bielskis’ parents were killed, as were numerous other relatives; survivors were placed in a ghetto to serve as slave labor for the Nazis. Tuvia, Asael, and Zus broke out and helped others to follow. They built a rugged but survivable life in a nearby dense forest, obtaining weapons however possible to protect the nascent Jewish settlement and to conduct guerilla raids against Nazi forces. The day-in, day-out account of the next four years is an often unbearably intense chronicle of horror and courage. A novel telling a similar story would almost certainly be dismissed as outlandish, but Duffy's copious endnotes convincingly document the saga’s reality. All three brothers survived the forest years, as did and many of those they helped. Asael, conscripted into the Soviet army, died fighting German troops in February 1945. Tuvia and Zus made it to Israel with their wives, later settling in the US. Tuvia died in 1987, Zus in 1996, but Duffy had access to their widows and other relatives and uses those recollections wisely. Only the vast array of names, dates, and battles are sometimes difficult to assimilate.
A powerful recounting of a little-known story.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621074-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | JEWISH | GENERAL HISTORY
The author of a gritty portrait of an NYPD homicide detective (Close Pursuit, 1986) offers an equally vivid close-up of a US Army noncom before, during, and after the Gulf War. While Stroud focuses on Master Sergeant Dee Crane, a lifer whose MOS (military occupational specialty) is 11B (combat infantryman), he leaves himself plenty of room for maneuver. In recounting how his unmarried protagonist (blooded in Vietnam during the mid-1960s) preps young all-volunteer troops for deployment to Saudi Arabia, for example, Stroud moves backward and forward in time to provide historical perspectives on Crane's outfit, the 1st Division (a.k.a. The Big Red One), which has distinguished itself on battlefields from the Argonne Forest to the Kasserina Pass. He also touches on the horrific allure of combat, careerism in the Army's upper echelons, and the factors that prevent a long-serving professional like Crane from accepting, let alone pursuing, a commission. For the most part, however, Stroud's engrossing narrative is designed to illustrate how the brotherhood of sergeants—hard but not altogether hardened men plying a violent, demanding trade—constitutes the heart and soul of an armed force. Dragooned by his captain into a press conference on the eve of battle, Crane sets the record straight in grimly hilarious fashion on subjects as varied as casualties, the evolving role of women at or near the front, and the job of a soldier (``...to close with [the enemy] and kill him''). Though in the thick of the fighting, Crane and his inexperienced but well-trained men all make it home. At the close, nearing 50 and facing enforced retirement, the universal noncom takes cold comfort from the knowledge he has been ``a part of some great thing.'' A profane, like-it-is, and oddly elegiac take on close encounters of the enlisted man's kind that rings true throughout.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09552-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
The correspondence of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson reads as a quite modern set of documents. The author of the Declaration of Independence and the father of the Constitution frequently sound like bean counters, dealing more often with how to raise an army or reduce the foreign debt than with such lofty issues as inalienable rights and freedom of expression. Of course, they do address such great concepts, and they do it with the combination of wisdom and eloquence for which they have been rightly celebrated. Still, though revered as great thinkers, Jefferson and Madison clearly spent most of their hours hard at work with the business of politics, which often turned out to be the business of money and pride. The sweep of the letters is huge, from the early days of the Revolution through each man's presidency and their respective, grudging retreats to the status of Çminences grises. It's probably a good thing for Smith (director emeritus of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum) to have included the quotidian with the lofty exchanges. For the precision of thought and expression, and the marriage of idealism and worldly savvy, stand as both an inspiration and a rebuke to citizens of the current republic.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03691-X
Page Count: 2128
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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