In “The Jews, a History in So Many, Many Words” (currently #3 on the NYT.com website), Dwight Garner reviews Simon Schama’s recent forays into Jewish history:
Simon Schama, the prolific and protean British historian whose topics have included the French Revolution and the history of art, arrives now with a history of the Jewish people, and it’s a multimedia happening: two books and a five-part television documentary being broadcast on the BBC and PBS.
The first volume, “The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD,” is before us. The second, out this fall, takes us up to the present day. It bears a rather more somber subtitle: “When Words Fail: 1492-Present.”…
Some choice quotes:
Jewish history has survived, thanks to its people’s intense literacy. “From the beginning of the culture’s own self-consciousness, to be Jewish was to be Bookish,” Mr. Schama writes…
Mr. Schama mediates between historians. He lingers on the “procession of pink-faced Anglos — Bible scholars, missionaries, military engineers, mappers and surveyors, kitted out with their measuring tapes, their candles, notebooks, sketchbooks and pencils, accompanied by their NCOs and fellah-guides,” who have crisscrossed biblical lands, searching for relics…
… [Schama’s] narrative stresses that Jews have not been, as is often imagined, a culture apart; their culture has busily intermingled with many others…
Meanwhile, also in today’s NYT is “A Collaborative Effort” by Karen Avrich, who lives in NYC (imagine that):
When I was a child, my family spent several summers in Amsterdam. My mother, sister and I toured the city, wandered along the canals, visited the great museums and sampled the local chocolates. My father, meanwhile, buried himself in Amsterdam’s social history library, studying the papers of the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, known as Sasha. Sasha and Emma had been born in czarist Russia, immigrated to New York in the 1880s as teenagers, joined an anarchist group, and formed a lifelong friendship that remained immutable through protest rallies, bombing plots, prison time, love affairs, deportation, separation and war. My father, Paul Avrich, had been fascinated with them for years.
My father, who died in in 2006, was a professor of Russian history, a scholar drawn particularly to the radical underpinnings of that vast, doleful country. While he was researching the threads of political and social unrest, he was led to investigate anarchism and its adherents, men and women from around the world who espoused a Utopian society without government and fought tirelessly for their improbable goal.
When my father began to interview anarchists who had been active at the height of the movement in the early 20th century, he was smitten by their vivacity and stubborn idealism, intrigued by the stark contradictions of fanaticism and cerebral enlightenment. He traveled to meet them, listened to their stories, perused their precious letters and photographs, disarmed them with his palpable enthusiasm and curiosity. He chronicled their political influence, heroism, crimes and misdeeds, and became known as the leading scholar of the anarchist movement. He wrote about Russian uprisings, ruthless bomb makers, the doomed Sacco and Vanzetti, the tragic Haymarket incident.
Yet his longstanding hope was to undertake the epic story of Goldman and Berkman. The iconic, brazen Emma was far better known, although Sasha had achieved a measure of notoriety when he tried to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892, deeming his attack “the first terrorist act in America.” A dual biography of Sasha and Emma, my father believed, would be the crowning accomplishment of his career…
