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Book Review by Morton I. Teicher

FDR and the Jews. By Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman.

Cambridge, MA. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

433 Pages. $29.95

          From 1932 to 1944, Roosevelt ran for president an unprecedented four times. The vast majority of Jews enthusiastically supported him although some expressed concern as to whether or not he did everything possible to save the Jews of Europe. For the most part, however, Jews tended to accept his assertion that the best thing he could do for European Jews was to defeat the Nazis. Almost 40 years after Roosevelt died, this difference of opinion came to a head in 1984 when David S. Wyman published his harsh criticism of Roosevelt in The Abandonment of the Jews. Defenders and antagonists followed, writing a number of books on the subject. The latest contribution to the often strident debate is this new book by two American University history professors, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman. Their extensive research, using a wide variety of sources, documented in 76 pages of footnotes, has resulted in this thoughtful assessment that disparages die-hard extremists on both sides of the debate.    

          The authors forthrightly tackle one incident that is frequently utilized by Roosevelt’s critics as evidence of his deficiency – the 1939 voyage of the SS St. Louis from Europe to Cuba to Europe with its 937 Jewish passengers. Made into a novel and a movie, this incident aroused considerable attention. The Cuban visas held by the passengers were revoked while the ship was still at sea and when the ship reached Havana, only 28 passengers were allowed to land. The ship sailed along the Florida coast while efforts were made to find a solution to the problem. Immigration quota restrictions barred the admission of the passengers to the United States. The State Department made feeble efforts to deal with the issue but the ship eventually returned to Europe with its passengers aboard. They disembarked in England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Some critics assert that most of these people died in the Holocaust. Breitman and Lichtman claim that this is an exaggeration and that “about half of the original 937 passengers eventually immigrated into the United States.” Also, most of the 288 passengers who landed in Great Britain survived the war. Moreover, they assert that Roosevelt was minimally involved in the St. Louis affair having been in Hyde Park or confined to his room in the White House because of illness as the events unfolded.

          Another charge by Roosevelt’s faultfinders is that he refused to bomb the gas chambers, rail heads, and crematoria at Auschwitz. The authors claim that Roosevelt was not involved in targeting decisions nor is there any hard evidence of his reviewing this particular issue. In any case, it is their view that Roosevelt would have responded by asserting his conviction that the best way to help Europe’s Jews was to win the war.

          While Breitman and Lichtman do not uniformly laud Roosevelt, they generally come down on his side in the debate about his relationship to Europe's Jews. In any event, they have provided a well-written analysis of the controversy, using the latest evidence generally to refute his critics and to support his adherents. Their easy-to-read contribution deserves to be widely read.

Dr. Morton I. Teicher is the Founding Dean, Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University and Dean Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Book Review by Morton I. Teicher

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.
By Nathan Englander.
New York: Vintage Books, 2013. 240 Pages. $15

         In 1999, Englander published his first collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Three of the stories appeared in The Best American Short Stories and Englander was awarded fellowships and the Bard Fiction Prize. His first novel, the Ministry of Special Cases, was released in 2007. It was a riveting account of how Argentina’s military dictators captured and killed  opponents. many of them Jews. Englander alerted his readers to the necessity of vigilance against authoritarian tendencies wherever they might appear. In this newest book, Englander returns to the short story, a format in which he excels. 

         Short stories appear in the Bible, in Greek and Roman writings, and in medieval tales such as those by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Malory. During the 19th century, the short story as a distinctive literary genre flourished in the work of Scott, Balzac, Chekov, and Maupassant. American writers were masters of this art form as exemplified by Poe, Hawthorne, Irving, O. Henry, Anderson, and Hemingway, among others. Englander must be added to this distinguished company since he also develops his characters through actions under stress unlike the novel which shows events over time as the basis for its characters. His short stories demonstrate excellent craftsmanship and artistic skill, combining wit, comedy, and tragedy in different places at different times. 

         The range of settings for the stories in this new collection is most impressive – contemporary South Florida, rural Israel in 1973, 1987, 2000, and 2011, Long Island today, a peep show on New York’s 42nd Street, a summer camp for elders, a sales tour to bookstores by an “Author”, and Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market. The title story originally appeared in the New Yorker.  

         Englander’s familiarity with these settings stems from his having been born in Long Island, New York, where he grew up as an Orthodox Jew before attending school in Binghamton and Iowa. Now a secular Jew, he lived in Israel for five years before settling in Brooklyn, teaching fiction at Hunter College and spending part of the year in Madison, Wisconsin.

         The unbridled praise that Englander received for his first collection of short stories and for his novel is now solidified by this new collection. Taken together, the three books clearly establish Englander as a worthy successor to the past generation of distinguished American Jewish writers who preceded him.

Dr. Morton I. Teicher is the Founding Dean, Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University and Dean Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Book Review by Morton I. Teicher

The Scientists by Marco Roth

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 197 Pages. $23.

         Autobiographies tend to focus on the inner and personal lives of the authors. Memoirs have some elements of autobiography but their emphasis is on people and behavior other than that of the writer. In both instances, the result is an organized narrative designed for public consumption.

         Marco Roth has successfully combined both forms – autobiography and memoir – in his first book, The Scientists. Readers will learn about him, his thoughts and his experiences. They will also learn about his family, his friends, and the plots of  books by classical writers.

         He was born in 1974 to Jewish parents who lived on New York’s upper west side. His great, great grandfather was a poor man who originally sold cloth from a pushcart but whose vigor and ambition eventually led to the highly profitable Van Heusen shirt company. However, Roth’s father perceived himself as “middle-class,” deliberately choosing not to live on Park Avenue where he had grown up. Moreover, instead of a career in business, he chose to become a doctor, working as a researcher in a Bronx public hospital at a modest salary. Roth’s mother was a musician and she shared with Roth’s father their stance as non-observant, non-Zionist, liberal Jews. Judaism was a encumbering tribulation. They had high intellectual standards, seeing to it that Roth read classical literature and disapproving his interest in baseball.

         When Roth was 19, his father died of AIDS. He had been ill for more than ten years, supposedly contracting H.I.V. while working in the Mount Sinai sickle-cell clinic where he was accidentally jabbed by a needle that had been used to draw blood from a patient who presumably had the disease. In 1999, Roth’s aunt, novelist Anne Roiphe, published an autobiography, 1185 Park Avenue, in which she described growing up in a wealthy Jewish family with a younger brother (Roth’s father) who died of AIDS which, according to her, was contracted through a homosexual encounter.

         Roth describes a frustrating discussion with his aunt about her allegation as well as finding out more from his mother. He also recounts his literary studies in Europe and at Yale, where he failed to complete his doctoral dissertation. He mentions his rocky marriage, his five-year old daughter, and he details the many books he read. He does not mention helping to found “n plus 1” in 2004, a reasonably successful literary magazine of politics, literature, and culture where he is a senior editor, contributing articles in almost each edition. For the first issue, he co-authored “Palestine, the 51st State” which satirically offers a solution to the problems of Israel and the West Bank.

         This unusual memoir is bogged down occasionally by reports on the books that Roth read but, nevertheless, tells a compelling and forceful story that will intrigue and reward patient readers.

Dr. Morton I. Teicher is the Founding Dean, Wurzweiler School of Social Work and Dean Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Book Review by Morton I. Teicher

Hank Greenberg by John Rosengren

New York: New American Library, 2013. 392 Pages. $26.95

         There are and have been more than enough prominent Jewish athletes to warrant the establishment of several Jewish sports halls of fame. Netanya, Israel has an international one; California has two; Canada has one; and there are many others throughout the United States. Lists of inductees (easily found on the Internet) show the many sports in which Jews have excelled such as swimming, basketball, boxing, and baseball. Ask a group of Jewish sports fans who was the greatest Jewish athlete and you’ll start an interminable argument. But – of one thing you can be sure. If you limit the roll to baseball, Hank Greenberg’s name will be at the top of most lists although some will contend that Sandy Koufax deserves to be first.  

          There’s little doubt as to how John Rosengren, author of this biography, would answer the question. He is a journalist, specializing in sports, who has written several other books and numerous articles. Hank Greenberg is a special individual and celebrity to Rosengren as clearly demonstrated by his referring to Greenberg as “the hero of heroes.” Moreover, in his epilogue, resolving any possible doubt, Rosengren writes, “Hank Greenberg remains the greatest Jewish baseball player – nay athlete – of all time.”

         The book opens with Greenberg’s dilemma about playing on the High Holidays since he was brought up in an Orthodox home. He resolved the issue by participating on Rosh Hashanah but not on Yom Kippur. His first year in the big leagues was 1933 when he was the first baseman for the Detroit Tigers. Having been born and grown up in New York, he would have preferred playing for the Yankees but Lou Gehrig had a firm lock on serving as the Yankee first baseman.

         In Greenberg’s second year, he led the Tigers to their first pennant in twenty-five years. Rosengren details what happened in the ensuing years as Greenberg became a star. In 1941, he was drafted into the army and released two days before Pearl Harbor. He immediately re-enlisted and wound up serving four years in the military. He returned to play for three years, retiring after the 1947 season. His final season coincided with Jackie Robinson’s initial year in the majors and Greenberg helped him to get started despite the hostility shown by many players. For Greenberg, it was reliving the anti-Semitism he encountered when he started out. He continued to support black players from the front-office jobs he held after he was no longer active on the field.

         Although the book’s emphasis is on Greenberg as a baseball player, Rosengren briefly describes his personal life, including his two marriages and his three children. Greenberg died in 1986 at the age of 75.  “His legacy,” Rosengren concludes, “shines a light for all Americans to follow.”

Dr. Morton I. Teicher is the Founding Dean of the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University and Dean Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Book Review by Morton I. Teicher

The Patagonian Hare by Claude Lanzmann

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 538 Pages. $35

           This noteworthy collection of autobiographical memoirs was written by a remarkable man – Claude Lanzmann. His name is not as well-known as it deserves to be although it will quickly come to mind for most people as soon as he is identified as the film maker who put together the landmark movie, Shoah. How he created this authoritative nine and a half hour production is the gripping story told in the last hundred pages of this outstanding book. Preceding that are his wide-ranging thoughts about his extraordinary life set off by his singular musings about a variety of subjects.

         He begins with a distinctive discussion of the guillotine as the exemplar of capital punishment which he calls “the abiding obsession of my life.” Although the rest of the book does not validate this assertion, Lanzmann makes a persuasive case for abolition of the death penalty. This strange but fascinating opening gives way to a somewhat more traditional recital of the details of his unconventional life.

         Lanzmann was born in Paris in 1925 to left-wing Jewish parents who separated when he was nine. He became a member of the Young Communists and, at age 18, during World War II, he became active in the French resistance. After the war, he studied, taught, and traveled extensively in Germany, the USSR, China, and North Korea. He wrote many articles for a media company that owned magazines and newspapers. He was based on Paris’s Left Bank where he met the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre who, for a while, lived with Lanzmann’s actress sister, Evelyne.  

       Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who was a novelist, philosopher, and feminist were lifelong friends, traveling companions, and occasional lovers. They started a journal for which Lanzmann wrote, later becoming its editor. De Beauvoir and Lanzmann began an affair in 1952 just before he left for Israel and, on his return to Paris, they lived together until 1959. They maintained their friendship while she continued her relationship with Sartre until he died in 1980. The book describes many trips the three of them made together.  

          Lanzman visited Israel several times, once meeting Ben-Gurion who urged him to settle in Israel. Instead, financed by an unnamed “millionaire’s daughter” he made a documentary film about the country’s residents, Pourquois Israel. Its success led to Lanzmann’s being invited in 1973 by the director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to produce a film about the Holocaust. Refusing to use existing archival footage, he made many trips to Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States, seeking out and interviewing former Nazis and Holocaust survivors, as well as filming Holocaust sites. Lanzmann finally released Shoah in April, 1985 in Paris. As previously indicated, the production and enthusiastic reception of this film occupies the final section of this book.

          The enigmatic title that Lanzmann gives his book is “explained” as referring to the hares in Birkenau, Serbia, and  Patagonia. This unsatisfactory clarification does not detract from a book that is exceptionally impressive despite its ambiguous title.

Dr. Morton I. Teicher is the Founding Dean, Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University and Dean Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.