Moving Towards Zion: A Review of The Story of the Jews, Vol. 2: Belonging, 1492-1900 by Simon Schama

The Story of the Jews Volume Two: Belonging: 1492-1900 by Simon Schama

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The recent surge of anti-semitism in Europe and America has been heart breaking, especially when that anti-semitism led to violence at a Pittsburgh synagogue by a white supremacist terrorist in 2018. Sadly, Jewish history is fraught with such tragedies, even before you get to the Holocaust under the Nazis. But Jewish history is far more than these senseless tragedies. In this second volume to his planned trilogy, historian Simon Schama traces the history of the Jewish people from the Renaissance to the dawn of the 20th century, laying out in dense detail their many triumphs and tragedies and their persistence in the face of unbelievable hardships.

Starting right where he left off in volume one, Mr. Schama details how the constant attacks on the Jewish people forced them to adapt and migrate multiple times.  What is interesting is that the beginning and end of this narrative are bookended by messianic movements that led Jews to try to migrate out of Europe and into Palestine.  The earliest attempts were not always successful, but the last one detailed by Mr. Schama leads readers into the beginning of the Zionist movement, which will lead to the creation of the modern state of Israel in the 20th century.  It was fascinating to see how Jewish people could be just as susceptible to messianic movements and false messiahs in the same way that Christians of this period could.  It seems looking forward to a better world and trying to proactively bring it about is not exclusive to any single religious group.

Though the descriptions of anti-semitic assaults are difficult to read, Mr. Schama does a great job of walking his readers through it and drawing a subtle line from the attempts at forced conversions and the creation of the ghettos in the 16th century, and the nationalistic anti-semitism of 19th century Germany, which would be supercharged by the Nazis later.  Yet, in the midst of these terrible trials, Mr. Schama also paints several portraits of fascinating characters in Jewish history.  People like Shabbetai Zevi, Moses Mendelssohn, Uriah Levy, and so many others are absolutely fascinating in this book.  Also, Mr. Schama’s details about the rise of Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Kabbalah Judaism are interesting too.

Another great aspect of this book is how Mr. Schama describes how the age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution promised to amicably assimilate Jews into the wider European culture, but it was a promise that was never fully realized.  As soon as France and other nations offered a hand, once Jewish groups tried to take it, they would find that it was almost always filled with empty promises.  The failure of the Enlightenment’s assimilation promises, combined with a new and virulent form of anti-semitism by the late 19th century, creates the historical backdrop for the forming of the Zionist movement.

However, this is not an easy book to get through.  This book is stuffed to the brim with details and stories that it implores you to read it slowly.  Skipping or speed-reading a single paragraph means that you will inevitably miss important details and get lost pretty quickly.  This is, without question, one of the densest history books I have ever read. In fact it is denser than his previous volume.  Do not start this book expecting to get through it quickly.  I did, and I ended up having to pause my reading or slow it down considerably just to get through it all.

Overall, this is a fascinating book, but one that is incredibly dense and begs its readers to chew on it slowly, rather than to rush through.  I look forward to reading Mr. Schama’s third volume and hope that it will be released sooner rather than later.

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Trumpism Around the World: A Review of Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since former Pres. Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, there have been a ton of books written regarding our current political moment. While many have of these books have been directed straight at former Pres. Trump, many others address Trumpism more tangentially, trying to explain the political and cultural forces that have made his rise possible. While these are valuable books about American politics, they fail to take into account that the rise of the extreme right is a global issue. In this book, not only does Mr. Applebaum provide an invaluable look at this global phenomenon, she also offers a different way to look at how these political forces are aided and abetted, and she offers a personal story of loss friendships that sound very familiar to many readers today.

As a historian of the Soviet era who is married to a Polish politician, Ms. Applebaum is well placed to comment on the rise of the extreme right in Europe and America.  She specifically devotes time to the nations of the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Poland, and Hungary in her analysis and even American readers who are only familiar with the rise of Trumpism will get chills at how familiar much of the rhetoric is in these countries.  Indeed, you could take the essence of former Pres. Trump’s “America First” message and adapt it to any one of these countries and the politicians trying to lead these extreme political movements.  Thus, Ms. Applebaum makes a very strong case that the rise of extreme right political movements is cause for global concern.

One of the more valuable aspects of this book is that she doesn’t focus all of her energy on the leaders of these movements, like Donald Trump of Victor Orban.  Instead, much of her attention is focused on middling politicians and intellectuals who aid and abet their rise whom she calls clercs.  She sets up this argument in an explicit contrast to Hannah Arendt’s own analysis on totalitarianism in such classic works as The Banality of Evil.  In this book, Ms. Applebaum argues that these clercs are not just “following orders” like German citizens were under Nazism.  Instead, whether out of jealousy, thwarted ambition, sheer opportunism, or all of these things, these clercs provide the intellectual and political framework for the rise of extreme right politicians.  It’s an intriguing look at our current political moment as well as a great critique of a famous political theory.

What makes Ms. Applebaum’s analysis of present day clercs intriguing though is that she is not examining them not just as an academic from afar.  As a self-proclaimed center-right Reaganite, Ms. Applebaum has known and met many of these clercs.  Some of them were her very good friends.  Thus, she is not just speaking as an academic, she is speaking from personal experience seeing many of her friends succumb to the allure of extreme right politics.  Her shock at seeing so many of her friends, who were staunch anti-communists and prominent politicians who took part in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, fall for propaganda, misinformation, and lies, or even propagate them, is evident.  So too is her personal pain at losing these friends.  This is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.  While her personal experience with many of these clercs aids this book, her pain is also palpable and at times she can’t stop herself from criticizing her former friends and the people they surround themselves with rather harshly.  Granted, much of that criticism may be warranted, but this book does lurch from time to time into a screed of personal betrayal. 

In conclusion, while there are plenty of Trump books or Trump-adjacent books out there, this is one of the few of those books that offers a truly global perspective.  She may indulge in some rather harsh criticism, but Ms. Applebaum speaks as both an academic with unimpeachable credentials as well as from personal experience.  If you’re still interested in reading Trump or Trump-adjacent books, I would highly recommend this book to you.

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Plodding through Communism's Fall: A Review of Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The fall of the Soviet Union is a watershed moment in the history of the 20th century and is often viewed by the West as a triumphant moment. But what about the people of the Soviet Union who lived through it? Svetlana Alexievich attempts to gives voice to the ordinary Russians and people living under the Soviets in this book and, many times, offers compelling oral testimony about what the end of communism looked like on the inside, but too often is unbearably slow and lacking in any meaningful context to help a Western reader orient themselves.

If you are living in the West, especially in the United States, before you pick up this book you should keep in mind that you are definitely not the intended audience.  This was written in Russian for Russian-speaking people.  Throughout the book there are references to Soviet political and cultural icons many of whom are incredibly obscure to a Western audience.  They are so obscure in fact that this book is littered with footnotes from the editor explaining who this person was.  Normally, footnotes are not a problem, but there are so many here that it may make it difficult for a Western reader to fully immerse themselves in this world.

Another thing to keep in mind about this book is that it is an oral history and one that is quite unlike any other oral history you may have read before.  In most oral histories, the author will interject some narrative and context behind the person who is speaking, maybe even a little biography of the person and their background.  Ms. Alexievich forgoes all of that in favor of letting the speaker completely speak for themselves.  She never mentions what questions she asked to get such responses from her subjects and only rarely jumps in with with some italicized narrative throughout the book.  Reading this book is the equivalent of reading a series of longwinded interviews with the interviewer almost entirely scrubbed out of the story.  

This refusal to inject herself into the book’s narrative can be both a blessing and a curse.  With some of her most interesting subjects, such as those who were either in the Kremlin or were apart of some of the critical moments, such as the August 1991 putsch in Moscow or the demonstrations against President Lukashenko in Belarus.  These were some of the best and most dramatic parts of this book.  However, a lot of this book does not center around these key historical events.  Thus, many of the interviews have this searching quality to it with people asking what did it all mean?  What did Soviets fight for in the Second World War if communism would just end?  Is the capitalist system that replaced it any better?  For a Russian-speaking reader, there may be some identification with these pondering, but for a Western reader with little love for the Soviet Union, not so much.  Thus again, Western readers may have trouble sympathizing with some of the subjects in this book.  

Then there are the purely ordinary Soviets just trying to live their lives in a new world.  Again some of these stories are interesting, but others are so melodramatic as to be almost a parody of life in Russia.  There are copious stories about alcohol abuse and domestic violence throughout this book and particularly in the second half.  Indeed, almost no marriage in this book doesn’t include alcoholism or domestic abuse or both.  The first few tales are interesting, but the ninth or tenth time it is told become repetitive and maudlin.  None of this is helped by the glacial space of this book.  Many of the chapters are unbearably slow, tedious reading.  This is not a book you should pick up for a quick breezy read as you should expect to sink a lot of time into reading it.

Ultimately, this book is a very mixed bag.  Some stories are incredibly fascinating and dramatic, especially the ones that link up with key historical moments.  But many other are incredibly slow, plodding stories with very little narrative meat for people to orient or attach themselves to.  If you are someone who is already familiar with this period in Russian history or already have your head soaked in the tales of ordinary modern life in Russia and the former Soviet states, you might find this book rather interesting.  However, if you’ve never learned about the fall of the Soviet Union and want to do so, read something else like The Future is History by Masha Gessen first before picking this book up.  

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