In a vividly narrated reexamination of the historical record, Zuccotti (History/Barnard; Italians and the Holocaust, 1987) tells the horrifying story of the fate of French Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators. With its egalitarian legacy from the French Revolution, France was traditionally one of Europe's most enlightened societies in extending civil rights to Jews. But beneath this tradition, Zuccotti says, lay a deeper, more ancient one of anti-Semitism, which surfaced in modern times during the Dreyfus affair (1895) and at other moments of crisis for France. After its fall to Germany in 1940, France was divided into an occupied zone and the nominally independent Vichy Republic. In both regions, Zuccotti says, French bureaucrats and police cooperated with the Nazis in implementing laws to identify and segregate Jews—with French police, for example, interning Jews in camps established by Vichy officials in the unoccupied zone. In policies that affected both French and foreign Jews, the Nazis—with official French assistance—rounded up thousands in the occupied zone: Zuccotti emphasizes the terrifying roundup in Paris on July 16, 1942, which began the systematic deportation and destruction of Jews in France. By autumn 1942, those interned in the Vichy Republic were being delivered on a large scale to the Nazis. The author records disparate French attitudes toward the arrests, ranging from indifference or malicious satisfaction to sympathy and support for the victims. Indeed, French apathy (which contrasted with widespread, active anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe) may have been responsible for the relatively high survival rate (76 percent) of Jews in France. Zuccotti also dwells on the courage of relief organizations and of individual Protestant and Catholic workers (as opposed to many in the Church hierarchy, who supported Vichy) who hid and sheltered thousands throughout the country. A balanced yet heartrending contribution to Holocaust literature.
Pub Date: July 14, 1993
ISBN: 0-465-03034-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
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.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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