KONRAD, GEORGE. Antipolitics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984 (an insightful look at East-West politics a few years before the fall).
TISMANEANU, VLADIMIR. Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel. New York: The Free Press, 1992.
JEWISH HISTORY
DAWIDOWICZ, LUCY S. What Is the Use of Jewish History. New York: Schocken Books, 1992 (collection of essays).
HOFFMAN, CHARLES. Grey Dawn: The Jews of Eastern Europe in the Post-Communist Era. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
JOHNSON, PAUL. A History of the Jews. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
SACHAR, ABRAM LEON. A History of the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966 (originally published in 1930).
SACHAR, HOWARD M. Diaspora: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Jewish World. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
JEWISH REFERENCE BOOKS
Encyclopaedia Judaica. 16 vols. Jerusalem: Keter, 1972.
Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988 (a new translation in modern idiom).
EPSTEIN, ISIDOR, ed. The Babylonian Talmud. 17 vols. London: Soncino Press, 1935.
KOLATCH, ALFRED J. The Jewish Book of Why. Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David, 1981.
PHILIPPE, BEATRICE. Les Juifs dans le monde contemporain. Paris: MA Editions, 1986.
RUNES, DAGOBERT D. Concise Dictionary of Judaism. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959.
UNTERMAN, ALAN. Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend. London: Thames & Hudson, 1991.
HOLOCAUST HISTORY
ARENDT, HANNAH. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1965.
BREITMAN, RICHARD. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
DAWIDOWICZ, LUCY S. The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
HILBERG, RAUL. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 vols. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.
—— Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933- 1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
SHIRER, WILLIAM L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.
SNYDER, LOUIS L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
SPEER, ALBERT. Inside the Third Reich. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
TAYLOR, JAMES, and WARREN SHAW. The Third Reich Almanac. New York: World Almanac, 1987.
BY COUNTRY
Belgium
DUMONT, SERGE. Les Brigades noires: Uextreme-droite en France et en Belgique francophone de 1944 a nos jours. Berchem: Editions EPO, 1982.
GUTWIRTH, JACQUES. Vie juive traditionnelle: Ethnologie d'une com-munaute hassidique. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1970.
KRANZLER, DAVID, and ELIEZER GEVIRTZ. To Save a World: Profiles of Holocaust Rescue. New York, London, Jerusalem: CIS Publishers, 1991. (With strong orthodox prejudices and awkward writing, this book describes among others, the story of Recha Rottenberg Sternbuch.)
Czechoslovakia
CHAPMAN, COLIN. August list: The Rape of Czechoslovakia. London: Cassell, 1968 (Sunday Times correspondent's account of the invasion).
FIEDLER, JIRI. Jewish Sights of Bohemia and Moravia. Prague: Sefer, 1991.
KUSIN, VLADIMIR V. From Dubcek to Charter 77: A Study of “Normalization’ in Czechoslovakia. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978.
RYBAR, CTIBOR. Jewish Prague: Notes on History and Culture. Prague, 1991.
WOLCHIK, SHARON L. Czechoslovakia in Transition: Politics, Economics and Society. London and New York: Pinter, 1991.
France
BENSIOMON, DORIS, and SERGIO DELLA PERGOLA. La Population juive de France: Socio-demographie et identite. Paris: Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1986.
BERG, ROGER. Histoire du rabbinat francais (XVIe-XXe stick). Paris: Cerf, 1992.
BURNS, MICHAEL. Dreyfus: A Family Affair—1789-1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1991 (important insights into the nature, origin and development of twentieth-century French anti-Semitism).
ESKENAZI, FRANK, and EDOUARD WAINTROP. Le Talmud et la republique: Enquete sur les juifs francais a Vheure des renouveaux religieux. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1991.
GREEN, NANCY L. The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986.
HARRIS, ANDRE, and ALAIN DE SEDOUY. Juifs et frangais. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1979.
JOSEPHS, JEREMY. Swastika Over Paris: The Fate of the French Jews. London: Bloomsbury, 1989.
LACOUTURE, JEAN. De Gaulle. 3 vols. Paris: Le Seuil, 1985-86.
—— Pierre Mendes-F ranee. Paris: Le Seuil, 1981.
MORGAN, TED, An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Klaus Barbie Trial and the City of Lyon, 1940-1945. New York: William Morrow, 1990.
ROUSSO, HENRY, trans, by Arthur Goldhammer. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
SZAFRAN, MAURICE. Les Juifs dans la politique francaise: De 1945 a nos jours. Paris: Flammarion, 1990.
WINOCK, MICHEL. Edouard Drumont et Cie: Antisemitisme et fascisme en France. Paris, Seuil, 1982.
Germany
ASSHEUER, THOMAS, and HANS SARKOWICZ. Rechtsradikale in Deutsch- land: Die alte und die neue Rechte. Munich: Beck, 1990.
BORNEMAN, JOHN. After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books, 1991 (one of the first honest attempts in the West to give the Ossi viewpoint).
CKAIG, CORDON A. The Germans. New York: Penguin, 1991 (deservedly regarded as a classic study).
DEMETZ, PETER. After the Fires: Recent Writing in the Germanies, Austria and Switzerland. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
FROHN, AXEL. Holocaust and Shilumin: The Policy of Wiedergut- machung in the Early 1950s. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1991.
CKLB, NORMAN. The Berlin Wall. New York: Dorset Press, 1990.
JASCHKE, HANS-GERD. Die Republikaner: Profd einer Rechtsaussen-Partei. Berlin: Dietz, 1990.
KRAMER, JANE. “Neo-Nazis: A Chaos in the Head.” The New Yorker, June 14, 1993.
MCELVOY, ANNE. The Saddled Cow. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.
MAOR, HARRY. Uber den Wiederaufbau der judischen Gemeinden in Deutschland seit 1945. Mainz: Universitat zu Mainz, 1961.
MOREAU, PATRICK. Les Heritiers du IIIe Reich: Uextreme droite alle- mande de 1945 a nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 1994.
RAFF, DIETHER. A History of Germany: From the Medieval Empire to the Present Oxford: Berg, 1990. (A textbook for German studies courses, this is a German view of German history.)
RANGE, PETER ROSS. German-Jewish Reconciliation? Facing the Past and Looking to the Future. Washington, D.C.: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1991.
REINHARZ, JEHUDA, and Walter Schatzberg, ed. The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War. Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1985.
SCHMIDT, MICHAEL. The New Reich: Violent Extremism in Unified Germany and Beyond. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
SCHNEIDER, PETER. The German Comedy: Scenes of Life After the Wall. New York: Noonday Press, 1991.
Hungary
LUKACS, JOHN. Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988.
The Netherlands
Documents of the Persecution of the Dutch Jewry J 940-J 945. Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1979.
HERS, J.F. PH., and J. L. TERPSTRA, ed. Stress: Medical and Legal Analysis of Late Effects of World War II Suffering in The Netherlands. The Hague: Gegevens Koninkluke Bibliotheek, 1988.
Poland
ABRAMSKY, CHIMEN, MACIEJ JACHIMCZYK, and ANTONY POLONSKY, eds. The Jews of Poland. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
DAVIES, NORMAN. Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (The author
is a British professor considered a leading authority on Polish history, but this book is appallingly anti-Semitic.)
DOBROSZYCKI, LUCJAN, ed. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
GEBERT, KONSTANTY. “Anti-Semitism in the 1990 Polish Presidential Election,” Social Research, vol. 58, no. 4 (Winter 1991).
GUTMAN, YLSRAEL, EZRA MENDELSOHN, JEHUDA REINHARZ, and CHONE SHMERUK, eds. The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989.
HALKOWSKI, HENRYK. “Cracow, ‘City and Mother to Israel,’ “ in Cracow: Dialogue of Traditions. Cracow: Znak, 1991.
HERTZ, ALEKSANDER. The Jews in Polish Culture. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
KLEIN, THEO. UAffaire du Carmel dAuschwitz. Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991.
KRALL, HANNA. Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. New York:. Henry Holt, 1986 (almost unbearably artsy approach, but Edelman is fascinating).
PEASE, NEAL. Poland, the United States and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919-1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
TOLLET, DANIEL. Histoire des juifs en Pologne du XVIe siecle a nos jours. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris, 1992.
Soviet Union
GUELMAN, ZVI. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union —1881 to the Present. New York: Schocken Books, 1988.
PINKUS, BENJAMIN. The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
RAPOPORT, LOUIS. Stalin S War Against the Jews: The Doctor's Plot and the Soviet Solution. New York: The Free Press, 1990.
FICTION
KONRAD, GEORGE. A Feast in the Garden. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992 (semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in the Holocaust in Hungary through four decades of Hungarian Communism).
OZICK, CYNTHIA. The Shawl. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989 (brilliant fictional portrayal of an anguished survivor).
WEIL, GRETE. The Bride Price, translated by John Barrett. Boston: David Godine, 1992 (a novel weaving the experiences of a German Jewish survivor with the biblical story of David).
WEIL, JIRI. Mendelssohn Is on the Roof translated by Marie Winn. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992 (a sparkling tragicomic novel about Nazi-occupied Prague).
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Thank you is not enough to say to some 150 Jewish people who gave up their time and their privacy and were often willing to stir up the worst of memories to help me understand. They all have my deep affection.
I cannot find the words to thank Christine Toomey, who put many hours into this book, for all her interest, generosity, uncompromising intelligence, and the integrity to tell me whenever I was wrong. At a hundred turns she made this book far better than it would have been.
Also thanks to: Rabbi Chaskel Besser for his advice; Rabbi Her-shl Gluck for his help in the Czech and Slovak Republics; Hanna Kordowicz for her generous help, guidance, and friendship in Poland; Edith Kurzweil for her time, her thoughtful and well-informed advice, and her interest; the Mandls in Brno for their hospitality; Carol Mann who helped me through a couple of tough years; my agent Charlotte Sheedy for her wisdom and generosity; Eleanor Michael for her friendship and for sharing both her personal insights and the work of her father Harry Maor; Nancy Miller, my editor, for her clearheaded guidance and her steadfast vote of confidence; Jack and Rubye Monet, whose home was an oasis of warmth and humor; Linda Polman for her help and hospitality in Amsterdam; Daniel and Lynda Altmann for making me feel welcome in their home and community; Yale Reisner for both Russian and Hebrew translations; Irene Runge for her enthu.
A Chosen Few
MARK KURLANSKY
A Reader's Guide
A Conversation with Mark Kurlansky
In November 2001, Mark Kurlansky and Philip Gourevitch sat down to discuss A Chosen Few. Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker and formerly an editor at The Forward, is the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case.
Philip Gourevitch: It's nearly ten years now since you traveled through Central and Eastern Europe gathering the material for this book. At that time, the region was still just emerging from half a century behind the Iron Curtain. Today the Communist period already seems a much more remote memory—at least from over here. What is your sense of how the Jewish communities you immersed yourself in for this book have experienced the intervening decade?
Mark Kurlansky: I did the reporting for this book in ‘92 and ‘93. I've been back to most of these places since anyway, but I specifically went recently to write a new introduction. The communities have not greatly changed, in part because I did my original reporting after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was a huge event. It is remarkable that the East Germans and the West Germans, both Jews and non-Jews, are no closer together now than they were ten years ago. They are so distinct that you could just walk into a bar or restaurant and pick out who's an Ossie and who's a Wessie. In the Jewish communities in Western Europe, there's a slight difference in atmosphere now because they went through a period, mostly in the ‘80s, of constant attacks, bombings, and machine gunnings by Palestinian groups. Sometimes neo-Nazi groups claimed the attack, but most of them turned out to be the work of Palestinian groups. This is all clearly remembered but the attacks have become less frequent.
PG: What made them taper off?
MK: I don't think anybody is really sure, since so little was done to apprehend the terrorists. What do you want to bet that some of these people who were doing that then are still very active attacking other places? It is interesting to note that those terrorism networks were not nearly as urgent to uncover and stop when they were just killing Jews. The climate in those places has somewhat changed, although you can still go to any city in Western Europe on Rosh Hashanah, or even on a Friday night, and if you are looking for a synagogue just look for a place where the armed guards are out in the street, and there you will find a synagogue. That has become a way of life for European Jews, just as I suspect it is going to become for American Jews.
PG: When you wrote this book, you were writing in a time of transition, and the transition was a time of hope. There was a sense of emergence and reconnection with the rest of the world—and for Jews with their Jewishness and with international Jewish life more broadly. So when you say that things haven't changed all that much in the intervening decade, I wonder do the people you visited at the time still feel that hope, or has it faded into discouragement?
MK: I would have to say a lot of that hope came from America, or from the world Jewish community. Especially in Central Europe. The Jews there were always a little dubious, kind of dazzled by the interest that the Jews in the rest of the world were taking, and fascinated by what was available to them and what they were learning. And now a lot of these people, a lot of their children, have spent a year or two in Israel—something that was unimaginable before—but it hasn't translated into a flowering of Judaism in Central Europe, partly because the numbers aren't really there, and partly because of the irony that while Communism often repressed Jews it also repressed anti-Semites, or at least right-wing anti-Semites. So now Jews are much freer, but anti-Semites are much freer too. It's extraordinary the kinds of debates that are going on in Poland, that would have been unthinkable under Communism.
PG: Like what? Is the Nazi past being reckoned with or denied, or both?
MK: It was recently discovered in Poland that some Poles actually were involved in the Holocaust. This was not very surprising news to you and me, but when it was revealed by a Polish Jewish writer, Jan Gross, it launched a debate in all of the major newspapers, with hundreds of articles. Some responses have been positive. The government for the first time actually issued an apology. According to a survey, only about 30 percent of the Poles ap
proved of the apology and there is a lot of talk about how this is just a Jewish conspiracy to defame the Polish people. Things get said in these debates that are the kinds of things that you and I would just be appalled by. You have to really extend your imagination to understand why these Jews are there and why they are staying there. After all of the history they have been through and their families have been through and the kinds of things that are still said, you'd say, “Why don't you leave?” They don't leave because it's their home.
PG: Yes, people on the outside often look at people in tough spots and say, “Oh, I would just get out of there,” but that really shows a failure of imagination, a failure to understand what it means to have a home, and even more what it means to be displaced from that home as a refugee. There are places in the book where you address this, and suggest that the continuation of European Jewish life after the Holocaust means, in an important way, that Hitler failed. I'm not so sure—but do you continue to feel that?
MK: Yes, in a certain symbolic sense, although I recognize that it isn't very easy to live your life as a metaphor. I went to a regular Friday-night service last week, which happened to be the sixty-third anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the Rabbi commented on the statement it made that we were still all there, a crowded synagogue with hundreds of Jews. You can feel good about that. But it's one thing to go on a Friday night for an anniversary and another to make it your life's work. I don't think that these people were largely motivated by symbolism. It's a thought they may have from time to time and feel good about, but they by-and-large went back and stayed for other reasons, often very pragmatic reasons, and there are a lot of people who really intended to leave someday but just never got it together to go to Israel or wherever it was they were planning on going. Or they came back and got involved with family things—all the things that happen to people that stop them from doing things they are planning on doing.
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