A richly contextual, skillfully woven historical study.
A powerful combination of history and personal memoir of a small town in Galicia, a representative narrative of the multilayered stories of the Jews who populated a region decimated in World War II.
Bartov’s mother came from the small town of Buczacz, on the Strypa River, now in Poland and depopulated of the diverse Jewish community that once thrived in the area largely from the 16th to the early 20th centuries. The author, a professor of European history at Brown, uses this agricultural center as a point of departure to create a fascinating cultural and social history of Galicia, a swath of territory stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea, once known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Originally ruled in the 16th century by Polish nobles who invited Jews to run their estates, then annexed by the Austrian Empire in 1772, the land was always on the “periphery, made up of a bewildering mix of humanity of dubious loyalties.” Bartov refers frequently to the work of Hebrew-language author S.Y. Agnon, also from Buczacz. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1966, he minutely delineated the lost shtetl life of Eastern Europe just as Bartov’s mother had experienced it. (The author’s excavation of his mother’s difficult life is especially poignant.) As Bartov demonstrates, the ethnic makeup of Galicia underwent numerous convulsions over the centuries. These changes included the growth of Hasidism as a reaction to the forces of Enlightenment currents from the West; “the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe” and the full emancipation of Jews in 1867, when the Hapsburgs were defeated by Prussia and the empire of Austria-Hungary was created; and the rise of nationalism (especially in Ukraine) and antisemitism. Bartov deftly employs much of the relevant literature to show how disastrous the rise of nationalism was in vilifying the Jews as outsiders.
A richly contextual, skillfully woven historical study.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-25996-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
