reviews - Jewish Book Council

always with his hands up, are so apt that I usurp them here in a partial quotation:
“...Never, never, never was pity so twinned with outrage, or visionary image-making
so united with unforgiving historical fact...In Bak’s work there is absolute knowledge; I
think he must understand that his eye and his hand are anointed.” List of Bak
exhibits, galleries, museums and films.
Operation Last Chance—Simon Wiesenthal is gone, but Efraim Zuroff carries on
his work, described here truthfully but with a novelist’s ability to employ drama,
characterizations, and description so that this account communicates the frustration
and occasional triumphs of tracking down Nazi murderers, many of whom now live in
empire, but the facts end there. NYU professor
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite traces the unfolding
of the rest of the story in legend. Post-Biblical
Apocrypha, especially 2 Esdras, envisioned
the Ten Tribes hidden behind mountains and
a miraculous river and living proud, strong,
free, and independent lives. That enviable
state contrasted with the all too visible dispersion
and desperation of the Jews of the Southern
Kingdom after the destruction of the two
Temples, and gave them hope and comfort.
Where exactly were these pure, distant,
hidden Jews? They were always imagined to be
at the edge of the known world. As conquerors
and explorers extended the boundaries
of what was known, the lost tribes receded
to those far horizons. Travelers in the
Middle Ages, some credulous (like Benjamin
of Tudela) and some deceiving (like David
Reuveni), brought back stories of the tribes
that suggested they were scattered from India
to Ethiopia. After the European encounter
with the New World, there were legends about
hidden Jews in the jungles of South America,
as well as speculation that native North Americans
were descendants of the lost tribes.
...weaves the religious, legendary,
and scientific history of this idea
into a colorful and enchanting story.
Sometimes a purported connection to the
Tribes supported claims of privilege, as with
British theories of Ten Tribes ancestry. More
often, though, the belief in the persistence of
the Ten Tribes resembles the Shiite faith in
the occluded Twelfth Imam or the Czech
national story of the Hussite warriors hidden
in Mt. Blánik. Just as the Hussites are said to
stand ready to aid the Czech people in their
time of need, and the Twelfth Imam is to
emerge to bring salvation as Mahdi, the Ten
Tribes were imagined to have a large army
ready to defend the Jews. They offered the
consolations of strength in the face of loss,
eventual triumph following defeat, succor
amid distress. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite weaves the
religious, legendary, and scientific history of
www.jewishbookcouncil.org
this idea into a colorful and enchanting story,
told in scholarly detail with a deft personal
touch. Bibliography, index, notes. BG
URANIUM WARS:
THE SCIENTIFIC
RIVALRY THAT
CREATED THE
NUCLEAR AGE
Amir D. Aczel
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 256 pp. $27.00
ISBN: 978-0-230-61374-4
Despite the intimidating title, Uranium
Wars is, above all, a story about people.
The author introduces us to the key players in
the discovery of uranium and the history of
nuclear arms, bringing us into the lives and
struggles of the scientists, with brief interludes
to explain some of the science (in
remarkably easy and accessible language). He
shows us Marie Curie (among many others)
as a student searching for a Ph.D. thesis and
graduating with what was the start of Nobelwinning
research. He details the rivalry
between Curie’s daughter, Nobel Laureate
Irene Joliot-Curie, and Lise Meitner, two
women racing to explain how a nucleus splits
at a time when very few women dominated
any scientific discipline.
The relationships among the scientists
bring history to life and the sections about
the role of the Nazis in the arms race are gripping.
Aczel ends with a look at the U.S.’s own
questionable decision to drop the bomb—the
final product of the scientists’ research—onto
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the most
memorable chapters show Aczel, and the rest
of the world, struggling to understand what
the scientists knew and didn’t know about
the intended use of their efforts, and what
their feelings were when it happened.
Endnotes, illustrations, insert, references. AB
BOOK PROFILE
comfort and luxury. It reads like fiction, but unlike fiction, it is sadly truthful and
describes frustrating failures, mostly due to lack of cooperation by the governments
in question, as well as successes. Just by targeting them, flushing them out from their
covers, Zuroff achieves a certain level of victory, even if they are not ultimately
imprisoned. Zuroff may not carry a spear or a shield, but he is a true warrior searching
for justice and retribution.
Marcia Weiss Posner, Ph.D., is a librarian and program director at the Holocaust
Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County
HOLOCAUST STUDIES
ARNOLD DAGHANI’S
MEMORIES OF
MIKHAILOWKA: THE
ILLUSTRATED DIARY
OF A SLAVE LABOUR
CAMP SURVIVOR
Deborah Schultz and Edward Timms, eds.
Vallentine Mitchell, 2009. 243 pp. $32.50 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-0853036395 (pbk.)
The history of the publication of Daghani’s
diary is almost as depressing as the diary
itself which, after a brief introduction, is the first
part of this fascinating study. Entitled “The
Grave is in the Cherry Orchard” the history
describes in terse yet poetic detail life in the slave
labor camp of Mikhailowka during 1942 and
1943, where the Romanian artist and his wife,
Anisoara, whom he calls Nanino, are sent from
their home in Czernowitz to build a strategic
road for the Germans. During that year, besides
the unbearable hardships they endured, Daghani,
who had brought his paints and brushes with
him (at the suggestion of the arresting officer),
records both in English shorthand and, visually,
in genre-like paintings, cruelty, occasional kindnesses,
as well as portraits and interior scenes
commissioned by his captors. Making their
escape in 1943, the Daghanis carried the works
above their heads as they waded across the Bug
river and managed to get to a ghetto in Transnistria
where they survived until the end of the war.
The saga of the publication of this dual testament
then begins. Though written in English, it was
first published in Romanian in 1947. The
Daghanis were then living in Bucharest. It was
not until 1961 that the journal Adam: International
Review published it in England in its original
English. (The year before, it had been turned
down by a literary agent whose comment was
“good, but too few atrocities!”) Daghani’s paintings
and writings would be concerned through-
Spring 5770/2010 Jewish Book World 53