The German Mujahid
By Boualem Sansal
Translated by Frank Wynne
(Europa Editions, 240 pp., $15)
I.
The Invention of the Jewish People
By Shlomo Sand
Translated by Yael Lotan
(Verso, 400 pp., $34.95)
By the books an age reads and respects ye shall know it. What, then, shall we say of an age in which a book so intellectually shoddy that once, not very long ago, it would have been flunked as an undergraduate thesis by any self-respecting professor of history becomes a best-seller upon first appearing in Hebrew in Israel in 2008; goes on to win the prestigious Aujourd’hui Award of the association of French journalists; and now, in English translation, is taken seriously by reviewers and reporters, and nets its author an honored place on talk shows and in “advanced” opinion? Perhaps one might charitably say that such an age is forgetful and poorly educated and credulous. And to be fair, The Invention of the Jewish People does make one valid point. But let’s begin with the shoddiness.
Sand’s book is about Jewish nationhood, Jewish nationalism, and Zionism--each of which, in the best postmodern fashion and with due acknowledgment to such well-known theorists of national identity formation as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, Sand seeks to “deconstruct” by viewing it as an artificially cobbled modern notion rather than as a historically rooted phenomenon. This he does by means of two shopworn arguments, one completely absurd and one partly so.
Famine: A Short History
By Cormac Ó Gráda
(Princeton University Press, 327 pp., $27.95)
The earliest recorded famines, according to Cormac Ó Gráda in his brief but masterful book, are mentioned on Egyptian stelae from the third millennium B.C.E. In that time--and to an extent, even today, above the Aswan dam in Sudan--farmers along the Nile were dependent on the river flooding to irrigate their fields. But one flood out of five, Ó Gráda tells us, was either too high or too low. The result was often starvation. The stelae commemorate the philanthropy of the aristocracy in providing food to the hungry. Other records of famine in the ancient world can be found in texts as various as Gilgamesh, the Joseph narrative in Genesis, Nehemiah, Cicero, and the Book of Revelation, in which the figure of famine is the third of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Starting at midnight on December 15, 2009, the Google logo was draped in a green flag. Perhaps you thought it was the Palestinian or the Saudi flag; perhaps this unsettled you enough to mouse it. If you did, you’d have learned that the flag celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto. And if you clicked on it, you’d have helped make “L.L. Zamenhof” the third most often-searched term on Google that day.
I’m not a big fan of political speeches in general, but I thought President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech today was unusually good. (If I were a speech-y kind of writer, like Rick Hertzberg, I’d have used a better adjective in the last sentence than “good.”)
Trotsky
Robert Service
Harvard University Press, $35
When Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by an agent of Stalin, in 1940, the American novelist James T. Farrell took to the pages of Partisan Review to memorialize him. “The life of Leon Trotsky is one of the great tragic dramas of modern history,” Farrell’s obituary began, and it only gets more idolatrous from there. “Pitting his brain and will against the despotic rulers of a great empire, fully conscious of the power, the resources, the cunning and cruelty of his enemy, Trotsky had one weapon at his command--his ideas. His courage never faltered; his will never broke.”
Thomas Omestad covered the Velvet Revolution in Prague for the December 25, 1989, issue of TNR. Read his piece here.
The opening moments of what became known as Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” did not feel so velvety. Nor did the outcome of those events--a largely peaceful triumph of the people over a stifling authoritarian system--seem certain. For those on the streets of Prague on the evening of Friday, November 17, 1989, it was easy to imagine a tragedy-in-the-making and perhaps a reprieve, of sorts, for a dying regime. The rosy glow of hindsight with which we remember the Velvet Revolution had not yet formed.
Last week’s U.S.-EU annual summit differed from its predecessors in ways that fuel the perception on the other side of the Atlantic that Barack Obama is just not that interested in Europe. First, there was the venue of the opening lunch: Blair House, the government’s official guest house, not the usual White House. Then, there was the luncheon’s host: Vice-President Joe Biden, not the president himself. And, finally, there was the time frame for discussion: European leaders only got 90 minutes of direct talks with the president instead of the customary two hours (minimum), plus a press conference.
All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims. --Gabriel García Márquez
I.
Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.
I didn't comment on Post columnist Anne Applebaum's first short web piece in defense of Roman Polanski. Among its many flaws, it claimed that there was "evidence" that Polanski believed the girl he statutorily raped was older (in fact, he stated under oath that he knew she was 13), and it failed to disclose that Applebaum's husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, is a Polish minister who, in his official role, was appealing to U.S. authorities to drop the proceedings against Polanski. But Applebaum's followup is really too much to ignore. She begins [her words indented, the commenter's in italics]:
Of all the many and unexpected responses I received to my four-paragraph blog post on Roman Polanski, two struck me as worthy of reaction. Here is the first, from an online comment:
Hey Ann Applebaum do you have a young daughter? How about I rape her??? Please, I just love raping little girls.
The comment, obviously, is repellent. But what's most striking is that this ugly idiocy is one of just two comments, out of several hundred, that Applebaum considers worthy of response. Many even-toned commenters made persuasive arguments against Applebaum's position. But instead of replying to any of them, she instead chose to address the most cretinous thug she could find, in what I can only read as an effort to make herself look reasonable by comparison.
The second comment she prints is a comparable example of defensive sifting, more subtle but arguably more disingenuous:
Today's missile defense decision seems like absolutely the right move to me on both hawkish and dovish grounds. Deploying the sea-based Aegis system will give us a capability that is both more reliable and more appropriate than the questionable coverage that would have been provided by the ground-based interceptors President Bush wanted to place in Poland.
The health care impasse has been a lucky break for the Obama administration. It has kept the people's eyes and minds off the disaster that it is brewing for us on Iran. Now, the fact is that on each and every foreign policy initiative it has taken defeat has stared us in the face. Some of our adversaries may be too cautious to rub it in our eyes. But all you have to do is read the papers to see.
It’s not often that a journalist manages to provoke immediate responses from the presidents of both the United States and Russia, but Peter Baker pulled it off Tuesday. Writing in The New York Times, Baker revealed the existence of a “secret letter” in which Barack Obama suggested that if Russia helped prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the United States might abandon its planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The future of Russia's excursion in Georgia remains to be determined. But some conclusions can already be drawn:
While a few foreign policy watchers were sounding the alarm about the Caucasus months in advance, Russia's invasion of Georgia sent most of the public and the commentariat running to their world maps. To avoid a repeat, we should probably keep an eye on the next likely flashpoint: Ukraine. The IHT has an update on developments there, which turn on the status of Russia's naval base in Crimea:
If you are a critic of the Bush administration, chances are that, at some point over the past six months, Ron Paul has said something that appealed to you. Paul describes himself as a libertarian, but, since his presidential campaign took off earlier this year, the Republican congressman has attracted donations and plaudits from across the ideological spectrum.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
By Saul Friedlander
(HarperCollins, 870 pp., $39.95)
When the United States deploys missiles in Europe, big things tend to happen. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter decided to install American Pershing II and cruise missiles on the continent to counter a Soviet missile known as the SS-20. Carried out four years later under Ronald Reagan, the deployment of these "Euromissiles" sparked a huge peace movement along with a wave of anti-Americanism.
Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, a name out of the deep past, had been bishop of Lublin where my parents were born. I heard his name as a child when he became first archbishop and then cardinal of Warsaw. My parents, and my mother especially, had bad memories of Wyszynski with regard to the Jews. Yes, the old Polish thing about the Jews. But, when he was arrested and incarcerated by the Communists, they softened on him, maybe even admired him a bit. His case was quite different from that of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary.
A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust
by David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff
(The New Press, 269 pp., $26.95)
PRAGUE
The enormous mass movement that has essentially overthrown Czechoslovak communism rose up with amazing speed. By the last week in November millions of people had participated in demonstrations across the country. Yet as recently as October 28--Czechoslovakia’s independence day--dissidents could bring only 10,000 people into the streets. These brave souls had scarcely unfurled their pro-democracy banners before truncheon-wielding police were chasing them through Prague's winding Gothic lanes. Three weeks later throngs of hundreds of thousands of people were routine in Wenceslas Square. In a matter of days they brought down the Communist leadership and dispatched the Party toward permanent oblivion.
