Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin edited by Donna-Lee Frieze (review)

From the evidence at hand, we inhabit an auspicious, extended moment in the Era of Raphael Lemkin, the coiner of the word genocide and the creative force behind the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Although he labored totally unofficially, his extraordinary achievement on behalf of the targets and victims of genocide has been well acknowledged, if not entirely celebrated. It’s likely that this attention is attributable to the continuation of genocide worldwide—along with the recognition that the genocide convention has largely failed to do its work—and to the extended discussion of Lemkin by Samantha Power in her book “A Problem from Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide. (The monograph won much praise, including the Raphael Lemkin Book Award in 2003.) There now exist centers for human rights and humanitarian awards named for Lemkin, major museum exhibitions and academic conferences devoted to his accomplishments, a recent biography and numerous magazine articles, and at least two plays (one of them my own).

The major missing piece of Lemkin’s own written output has been his autobiography. The unfinished manuscript has languished in a number of archives since its composition over several years in the late 1950s; Lemkin’s unsuccessful efforts to have it published brought him only frustration and disappointment. So the appearance of Totally Unofficial, edited by Donna-Lee Frieze, is an important and welcome event in the continuing efforts to make the “founder of the world movement against genocide” (as he sometimes signed his letters) and his totally unstoppable mission better known to the public more than a half-century after his death.

The strength of Frieze’s years-long project lies in the coherence she has brought to a manuscript that was characterized by huge chronological gaps, narrative redundancies, unreadable alterations, and extended passages heavily revised yet still incomplete. Lemkin’s life story, beginning with his childhood on a family farm in rural Poland and extending through the post-ratification years of struggle, neglect, and ill-health, reads splendidly in its entirety. With it, we are able to better comprehend the sweep of his relentless obsession and the extraordinary victory of his political objective. Although much of Lemkin’s life and work are known (and are totally, inextricably linked)—for example, through William Korey’s brief and readable “Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin” and John Cooper’s detailed but flatly written political recounting¹—having Lemkin in his own words in order to understand his life and measure his achievements is a special and long-overdue event.

The early chapters of Totally Unofficial reveal an innocence and wry, even ironic, humor, which, by the late chapters, changes to urgent pessimism. In between, we are treated to Lemkin’s courageous escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as his opinionated assessments of people, nations, and cultures. The centerpiece of the book contains his narrative of how the triumph of UN ratification was finally achieved on 12 January 1951, the day he called the most beautiful of his life. The story is replete with heroes (Panama’s Ricardo Alfaro, Pakistan’s Sir Muhammad Zafarullah Khan) and villains (Britain’s Sir Hartley Shawcross, the American Bar Association), and is exciting despite the fact that we know its outcome.

In the editing, there are some misspellings (Hereros not “Heroes” [185], Quenco not “Queuco” [193]), misstatements of fact (the Autonomous Republic of Birobidzan doesn’t “exist to this day with a thriving cultural presence” [246]), and misreadings (a female acquaintance of Lemkin’s is said to have danced with an exquisite “slant” [148], not élan as Lemkin wrote it). Some endnotes are less than useful, including long passages of treaty correspondence and the identification of a room number in a hotel Lemkin once stayed at. A more serious issue concerns the editor’s introduction, titled “The Insistent Prophet,” which contributes too little to a deeper assessment of her subject’s...