Book Reports: "A Hole in the Heart of the World" and "History on Trial"

I read A Hole in the Heart of the World in advance of our planned trip to Eastern Europe. It is the story of individual Jews in Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Warsaw who tried to build their lives after the destruction of World War II. Written by Boston journalist Jonathan Kaufman, the book is a breezy, not a scholarly, description of their lives, based more on personal interviews than on intellectual research.

Nevertheless, the difficult circumstances that these individuals found themselves in after the Holocaust, and how each of them led their lives, under Communist rule, with latent or actual anti-semitic occurrences hounding their progress, were both sad and empowering. The book provides a picture into a portion of modern European Jewish history not fully reported, and ends on an optimistic note, now that Communism and Nazism are both dead, and free societies have appeared across the entire continent.

We shall see.

(As an aside, I heard a presentation tonight written by the head of the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, as part of the opening ceremony of an exhibit on Jewish life in Berlin cosponsored by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington and the Goethe Institute. The story of Herman Simon, museum director, could have been a fifth story in A Hole. Born in East Berlin in 1949, Simon's mother had hid in Berlin throughout the war, while his father had left Germany for Palestine where he fought in the Jewish legion. Returning to Berlin when he heard that his former girlfriend had survived, they married and - out of political choice - moved to the Russian sector of Berlin (East Berlin). It is there that Simon lived until the wall came down. He still lives and works in former East Berlin, but now an undivided Berlin part of a democratic country.)

Last week, we went to hear a lecture by Deborah Lipstadt, author of Holocaust Deniers, a 1993 book which, among other things, named British military historian David Irving a denier. Irving sued Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, for libel in Britain where the laws put the burden on the defendant and are otherwise stacked in favor of the allegedly libeled party. Her new book History on Trial tells the story of her trial, which she won, painting Irving as a totally disingenuous and deceiptful, or simply delusional, historian, at least when it comes to Holocaust issues. It was a resounding victory, but a gruelling (and expensive) experience for Ms. Lipstadt.

But History on Trial is a valuable book on a number of scores. For our purposes in this posting, it is important because it permits you to see into the mind of an "intelligent" anti-semite and Holocaust denier, a type of person who (although Irving is English) must be prevelant in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe. Thus, you can gauge the type of persons with whom the foci of A Hole must have, much too often, had to deal.

A Hole in the Center of the Earth was published by Penguin in 1997. Coincidentally, Penguin was also the publisher of Holocaust Deniers, the book which formed the basis of Irving's suit. History on Trial was published by Ecco, a Harper-Collins imprint, in 2005.