A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry (review)

130 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 benefit from a conclusion that summarizes the findings she develops throughout. Marks's book draws extensively on medical history and demography and exploits sources rarely consulted by Jewish historians. Her well written and impressively researched book explores new ground and has rich comparative material, making it a major contribution to modem Jewish and British history. Susan L. Tananbaum Bowdoin College A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry, by Mark Kurlansky. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995. 410pp. $24.00. A Chosen Few is a moving account ofEuropean Jewry since 1945. Although the focus ofMr. Kurlansky's study is supposed to be the post-war era, much ofhis book deals with the personal lives of individuals ·he selected to represent the various European Jewish communities, and he usually takes his stOlies back to the 1930s to provide a comparison with Jewish life in Europe before the war as well as the impact ofthe Holocaust on Jewish communities. The impact of the Holocaust is told not with figures but with the stories of survival and death in family histories. This is a personal and impressionistic tale ofmodem European Jewish history. Mark Kurlansky, a journalist and writer who is a regular contributor to the International Herald Tribune and Partisan Review, is not a professional historian or an expert on Jewish history (his first book was on the Caribbean). However, he is a master story teller and a gifted writer. Since this is not the work of a scholar, there are no footnotes nor any detailed account ofsources, but there is an extensive bibliography. Fortunately, there are also no academic jargon, no ideological crusades, and no leaps into politically correct Agitprop. Rather, this is a book about people, a humane account ofthe lives ofEuropean Jewry and at times the impact of inhumanity on people's families. lbis account ofEuropean Jewry is ideal for the average reader, Jewish or Gentile, who wants to learn about the Jewish experience. The flow ofKurlansky's book is so intriguing it is difficult for the reader to put the book down unfinished. Experts on ethnic studies may not pay much attention to Kurlansky's book because it is written by a journalist and is free oftheoretical constructs, but reading A Chosen Few will give anyone an understanding of the forces that have shaped Jewish history over the last seventy-five years, and how the varieties of Jewish experience, such as Zionist, Marxist, Orthodox, Hasidic, and liberal, have played out in the lives of individuals. Kurlansky also masterfully uses the lives of individuals to show the positive and negative interplay between Jews and the European societies they live in. As an example, he tells the stories ofseveral Hungarian Jews who survived World War II in Budapest. For many Hungarians the arrival of Soviet troops in early 1945 created feelings of fear and Book Reviews 131 dread, through not knowing what changes the Soviet troops would bring. But for Budapest's Jews the feelings were ofrelief and jubilation. No more roundups by Germans for the death camps in Poland and no more roundups by teenage members ofthe Hungarian Arrow Cross, local fascists, who took Jews to the Danube and shot them for fun and watches. With the arrival of the Soviets the roundups ended. This event became a demarcation point in the lives ofHungarian Jews. A Chosen Few is an episodic account of European Jewry and not a comprehensive survey. Kurlansky concentrates on the Jewish communities in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Poland, France, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. For the most part, he does not mention the Jewish experience elsewhere in Europe. This is one ofthe significant shortcomings ofA Chosen Few. We learn nothing about the Jewish communities in the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Ironically, if the reader were to pick up Farewell Espana, by Howard Sachar, the reader could learn about some of the European communities Kurlansky ignores, such as the fate of Jewish communities in Sarajevo and Salonika and the rebirth of small Jewish communities in Lisbon, Madrid, and Barcelona, 500 years after the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. There are very few references to Sephardic Jewish...