We are privileged to have two Holocaust survivors as members of our group, Alex Redner and Norbert Zeelander. At our last meeting, we took advantage of their presence to ask them about their experiences, not during the war, but during presentations that they each regularly make at local schools and colleges. We found out that young people today know very little, if anything, about the Holocaust, but are generally eager to learn and receptive to the survivors’ presentations, underlining the importance of continuing to preserve the memories of the survivors among us, and continuing to give these recollections as wide a circulation as possible, especially among the youngsters in our schools.
To repeat George Santayana’s frequently quoted aphorism: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Of course, before we can learn from history, we must first know history, which is why those who teach about the Holocaust perform such an invaluable service.
It is fashionable nowadays, when a sports team or a business corporation sustain a devastating loss, to say that they were decimated. People do not necessarily realize that the word decimation originated with the occasional practice by especially ruthless Roman generals of punishing military units guilty of mutiny or desertion by executing every tenth man. Unfortunately, to say that European Jewry was decimated during the Holocaust is a gross understatement. A more accurate description would be to say that they were ‘halved.’ Approximately one-half of all European Jews alive during World War II were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices.
We discuss books about the Holocaust, and we do what we can to perpetuate the stories of the survivors, to keep the promise that we have made to ourselves, to our parents, and to all Holocaust survivors: “Never again.”
BOOKS DISCUSSED LAST NIGHT:
Darkness Hides the Flowers, by Ida Hoffmann Firestone, et alia. When the Nazi’s invaded France in 1940, Ida Hoffmann and Alex Redner’s wife, Lilly, were two Jewish girls living in the same village in France. Miraculously, and unbeknownst to each other, they both survived the Holocaust. After the war, they both married, and they both settled in the Philadelphia area. Many years later, and completely by accident, they found each other once again.
Unfortunately, Ida died last year, but prior to her death, she was a piano teacher, a painter, a poet, and a dedicated Holocaust educator. She spoke frequently to students throughout the Philadelphia metropolitan area, teaching compassion and tolerance by sharing her personal story of survival. Her story, her paintings, and her poems all became part of this slender, but beautiful and touching volume.On Sunday, November 20, 2011, 1-3 pm, Ida’s paintings will be displayed, and her story discussed by her co-authors, Dr. Jerry Jennings and Joanne Silver, at the Klein JCC, Polonsky Theater, 10100 Jamison Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19116. Please check out the program listing by clicking on this link, and please attend this program if you can possibly make it.
Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust, by Charles Stainback and Jeffrey Wolin. Wolin is an accomplished portrait photographer, the Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a second cousin of one of our faithful members, Janie Siman-Glatt. His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Paris; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Wolin has spent many years capturing, in stark black-and-white portraits, the faces, the numbers tattooed on forearms, and the character of Holocaust survivors. The photographs collected in this volume somehow manage to capture not only the painful memories etched into the faces of these people, but also the courage and determination that enabled them to emerge from the cauldron of the Holocaust into the sunshine of new and productive lives. This wonderful volume of photographs and stories not only helps to put a human face on what is otherwise such an unimaginable tragedy and crime, but it also manages to be inspirational and uplifting at the same time.Marienbad, by Sholem Aleichem. Contrary to the impression that we may have created by the contents of this post up to this point, we at Book Nosh actually spend most of our time chatting about current events, economic and political developments, our life experiences, and most importantly, of course, books that we have read. Although we get serious once in a while, we like nothing better than laughing at a good joke, or enjoying a funny book. In a way, Sholem Aleichem is the perfect author for our group. A prolific author, he used humor to describe, and soften the hard edges of, life in the shtetls “beyond the Pale.” As he himself said once, “No matter how bad things get, you've got to go on living, even if it kills you,” and humor helps us to get there.
This particular book, written toward the end of Sholem Aleichem’s all-too-short life, is actually a departure from his usual milieu. It describes affectionately, but with his usual rapier wit, the lives of well-to-do Jewish women who escape from their traditional husbands and fathers in the Warsaw ghetto to the chic spas of Germany and Bohemia in an amusing attempt to become part of fin-de-siècle Central European “jet set.” (I guess it was the “cabriolet set” back then.)
Breaking News, by Martin Fletcher. As we discussed in our September post, Fletcher’s novel The List is the 2011-2012 One Book, One Jewish Community selection of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. According to our reviewer, this non-fiction work by the same author is really an essential companion volume to his novel. Fletcher, as most novelists, bases his fiction upon his own life experiences. It is therefore helpful to know what those life experiences were, especially for a writer who has led such an interesting life.
A Jewish boy who grew up in London, and son of Holocaust survivors, he has spent his adult life as a journalist covering wars, revolutions, and natural disasters, including the incessant conflicts in the Middle East. He brings an unusual level of understanding to the costs of war and to the psychology of the survivors left behind. Given his background and experiences, it is not surprising that he is a passionate advocate for the rights of oppressed people everywhere, including the rights of Palestinian refugees. It is also enlightening to learn about his views about the difference between the Jewish refugees of the Holocaust, who founded and built Israel, and the Palestinian refugees, who continue to live in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria today. As Fletcher puts it, the Jewish refugees did not nurse their grievances, did not demand reparations, did not talk about a right of return; they rolled up their sleeves and built a new home and a new life for themselves.The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, by Simon Schama. Schama is another Jewish boy who grew up in London, the son of Jewish parents with roots in Lithuania, Romania, and Turkey. He is now a professor at Columbia University, and a renowned author and historian. He is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series, A History of Britain. As behooves any proper Upper West Side New Yorker, his politics are decidedly left of center. However, to his credit, he has been a vocal critic of those academics, particularly prevalent in Great Britain, who have been calling for a boycott of Israel, supposedly because of Israel's alleged oppression of the Palestinians. Writing about academicians calling for a boycott, Schama wrote: “This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On 1 April 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores.”
Schama’s writing is always incredibly learned and erudite, always very commercial, and usually contentious and intriguing. However, his thinking can veer from brilliant (see, e.g., his introduction to Jews/America: A Representation ) to muddled (see, e.g. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution).
This particular work, The Embarrassment of Riches, comes down on the brilliant end of the spectrum, according to our reviewer. It is an economic history of 17th century Holland, a time when the Dutch were the leading commercial empire in the world, enjoying unprecedented material wealth and culture, indulging in unrestrained consumerism and unfettered speculation. It was a time of the tulip mania and other speculative bubbles, a time of fortunes quickly made and lost, a time when speculators and con artists gradually took over from the manufacturers and traders who had made the nation great. It was also, especially in hindsight, a time of gradual but irreversible decline. In other words, it was a time that might be instructive to those of us living in the United States in the early 21st century. Certainly a book that it would behoove us to read._______________________
The discussions during our meeting were so interesting and far-ranging that we ran out of time long before we had a chance to discuss all the other books that our members brought to the meeting, including:
The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . and Where We're Going, by George Friedman
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, by George Friedman
The Coffee Trader: A Novel, by David Liss
Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Elliott Friedman
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933, by Amos Elon
With any luck at all, we will discuss all those books, and many more, at our upcoming meetings.
