Anti-Semitism and the Treatment of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Eastern Europe. byRandolph L. BrahamReview by: David EngelSlavic Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 891-893Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2501244 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

L'Europe centrale et ses minorites: Vers une solution europeenne? Ed. Andre Liebich and Andre Reszler. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. 207 pp. Paper.

Why don't we organize a con-ference? I am sure we can get some funding to invite speakers from several differen-t countries and convince thenm to participate by holding out the premise that their contributions will be published in a book of conference proceedings. How many of us have either overheard or participated in such conver- sations? And how else can one explain the appearance of the book under review? It is yet another of the numerous collections already resting on library shelves that contain disparate essays ranging in style, theme, and scholarly competence that pre- tend to have some unity of purpose because they are bound within the covers of a single volume. We have all been suffering from a crisis in publishing during the past few decades-the crisis being that with the advent of technology anyone can become a publisher and anything can-and more often than not does-get published.

The alleged "unifying" theme of this volume is "to root in the East those intangible basic principles that have made western Europe what it is today" (195). To illustrate that rather vague goal, the editors gathered together thirteen essays (several translated into French from English, German, or Italian originals), and grouped them into four thematic sections. The "weight of experience" section includes essays on how minor- ities have been treated in the past: Jean-Paul Bled on Austria-Hungary, Sebastian Bartsch on the League of Nations, and Victor-Yves Ghebali on the more recent Con- ference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The section entitled "Attempts at Independence" focuses on the Slovaks (by Bernard Michel and Stanislav J. Kirsch- baum) and the breakup of the Yugoslav federation (by Anton Bebler). The third sec- tion, "Is Co-Existance Impossible?" includes contributions on minorities in historic and post-World War II Hungary (by Andre Reszler and Victor Karady) and on the "frustrated" Romanians of Transylvania (by Bela Borsi-Kalman). In the last section, "Considering a Solution," Gaspar Bir6 and Alessandro Pizzorusso provide dense ar- guments laden with political science jargon in defense of self-determination, as related to individual and corporate rights, while Guy Heraud, in perhaps the only provocative contribution, takes to task intellectuals and policymakers in the European Community for their myopia and basic lack of knowledge about the peoples and politics of east central Europe's new states.

It has become routine for reviewers of multiauthored works to point out how inevitably some essays are better than others, and that is certainly the case here. This does not excuse the editors for publishing in 1993 essays written in 1991 about why Slovakia is not likely to become independen-t (Michel). Like many (perhaps most?) collected works about recent events that have grown out of conferences or, as is likely in this case, as a result of editorial solicitation, this book was largely dated before it ever went to press. Volumes like this should serve as a warning to the scholarly profes- sion: that same technology that makes it easy to publish everything should not be abused by scholars overanxious to justify the organization of yet another conference or the publication of yet another book on the postcommnunist world, regardless of what little value such activity has for a serious understanding of the region.

PAUl. RolIER'F MA1GOCSI University of Toronito

Anti-Semitism and the Treatment of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Eastern Europe. Ed. Randolph L. Braham. Holocaust Studies Series, East European Monographs, no. 155. New York: The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Graduate Center/ The City University of New York; Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1994. Dist. Columbia University Press. vii, 253 pp. Notes. Tables. Hard bound.

The volulme consists of eleven lectures delivered at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1992. All concern, in the editor's words, "the reassertion of xenophobic nationalism

Slavic Reviezv 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996)

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892 Slavic Review

and the concomitant rise of anti-Semitism in postcomiimunist East Central Europe" (v). The chapters include Randolph Braham's overview of the region as a whole, followed by analysis of individual countries: Bulgaria (Frederick B. Chary), the Czech Republic (Fred Hahn), Germany (Ruth Bettina Birn), Hungary (Istvan Deak and Andras Kovics), Poland (Abraham Brumnberg), Romania (Radu loanid), Slovakia (Raphael Vago), the former Soviet Union (William Korey), and the former Yugoslavia (Radmila Milenti- jevic).

The premise of the volume is that the attitude adopted by the governments and societies of the countries under examination toward the murder of theirJewish pop- ulations during World War II can be taken as a reliable indicator of the influence of what are variously referred to as the region's "xenophobic extremists," "Right radi- cals," or "nationalist-populist reactionaries." Specifically, it aims to show that because communist governments suppressed both the actual existence and the memory of prewar right-wing nationalist political formations for over forty years by tarring them as fascists and Nazi collaborators, the current anticoim-munist reaction naturally seeks to rehabilitate their image. To the extent that that image has been damaged by asso- ciation with the slaughter of Jews, efforts must be made to efface that connection, whether by denying the complicity of local nationalists in the killings or by denying the fact of the killings altogether. Hence, according to Braham, "just as unbridled anti- Semitism in the 1930s paved the way to the 'Final Solution,' the failure to confront the Holocaust honestly may once again encourage the spread of anti-Semitism with all its horrible social consequences in the postcommunist era"; and "the failure to deal effectively with ... anti-Semitism and to take resolute action against the Holocaust deniers may ... have a direct impact on the future development of genuine parlia- mentary democracies in East Central Europe" (20).

Fortunately, the essays in the volume demonstrate that the situation throughout the region is not uniform, and in most places not nearly as grim as Braham would have it. The correlations that he postulates appear most evident in Romania and Slovakia. In Romnania, according to loanid, a countrywide "campaign to rehabilitate [Ion] Antonescu as a national hero" that began in 1991 obscured "the historical fact that Antonescu was a dictator who suspended all political parties," hated democracy, and was responsible for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Rornaniain Jews (167-72). "The response of the democratic forces in Romania to this campaign," in- cluding the denial that Romanian Jews had died en masse in the Holocaust, has been, in his opinion, "weak and inconclusive" (174). In Slovakia, as interpreted by Vago, a similar move to vindicate the name of Josef Tiso has combined with "myths of Judeo- communism ... and the Jewish plutocracy" to propel Slovakia "toward a more au- thoritarian system in which nationalism will play a major role" (203). But on the other hand, the depictions of the situation in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Hungary point to the absence of such trends: hostility towardJews in these countries is represented as a fringe phenomenon, serving at most (in Hungary, according to Kovacs) "as a symbolic tool for establishing a political identity, not as an ideology directing political action" (127). In Croatia, although Franjo Tudjman's affinity for Holocaust revisionism is well known and its correlation with his espousal of Croatian separatism clear, the essay by Milentijevic does not show how this nexus has affected the country's internal politics. And Brumberg's and Korey's surveys of Poland and the former Soviet Union, while recounting a number of incidents in which right-wing parties decried the nefarious role ofJews in their countries, offer no evidence pointing to their political significance.

In the event, the rehabilitation of the right does not need to employ anti-Jewish motifs in the main, nor does it have necessarily to lead in an antidemocratic direction. Some liberal elements in Poland, for example, have been able to lionize the figure of General Wladyslaw Anders without taking his side in his wartime conflicts with Jews. The same elements have dealt with the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, not by denying its occurrence or by blaming it upon Jewish support for communism, but by depicting it as a communist provocation aimed at discrediting anticommunist forces. It is to be regretted that strategies such as these were not considered by any of the authors.

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Book Reviews 893

Evidently the mandate to concentrate on the anti-Jewish and antidemocratic aspects of postcommunist nationalism precluded a broader examination of the phenomenon on its own terms.

DAVID ENGEL New York University

Gypsies: A Multidisciplinary Annotated Bibliography. By Diane Tong. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. xviii, 399 pp. Indexes. Photographs. $60.00, hard bound.

Diane Tong's bibliography on the Roma or Gypsies, which ranges alphabetically from anthropology to women, joins a growing body of scholarship on this often misunder- stood, stereotyped group. As the author points out in her introductory comments, traditional writing on the Roma is often riddled with inaccuracies and a basic mis- understanding of the dynamics of Roma history and culture. Unfortunately, the author has countered these distortions with unwarranted critiques of certain scholars and authors that have no place in work of this nature. In addition, the author tries to mix what is predominantly a collection of English works on the Roma with a smattering of sources in German and a few eastern European languages. Because the author admits that she knows little German and thus cannot provide annotations for some of the German titles she lists, this unbalanced approach robs her bibliography of thematic continuity. Furthermore, the author has omitted some important English- language works such as the excellent articles on the Roma in the Radio Free Europel Radio Liberty Research Reports, Andrew Marchbin's "A History of the Origin and Mi- gration of the Gypsies" (1939), and A. P. Barannikov's The Ukrainian and South Russian Gypsy Dialects (1934).

Although this work provides the first detailed gathering of sources on the Porajmos or Gypsy Holocaust, in this category, too, the author has omitted some important works. The bibliography does not include the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau's two-volume Memorial Book: The Gypsies of Auschwitz-Birkenau (1993), which supplies camp records for all Gypsy inmates, or The Einsatzgruppen Reports (1989) by Yitzhak Arad et al., which provides detailed evidence of Nazi atrocities against the Roma in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1943.

As with any broad work, this bibliography reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the author's background. Tong is a gadie, or non-Roma, who has specialized in the study of Greek Roma. She has written a number of articles on this topic as well as edited a collection, Gypsy Folktales (1989). Consequently, her sections on Roma art, folklore, and photography are solid. Other strong sections are those that deal with children, children's literature, and women. The author also includes a list of period- icals published throughout the world by and about the Roma, but this section would have benefited from the inclusion of more data on some of the more obscure peri- odicals.

When Tong delves into subjects relating to eastern Europe and Russia, her lack of a strong, regional knowledge base becomes evident. She lists, for example, Alek- sandr Pushkin's The Gypsies and Lev Tolstoi's references to the Roma in his "Two Hussars," yet makes no mention of the numerous articles on the Roma in Russian -literature in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. Furthermore, she fails to include some even more important literary references, particularly in the case of Tolstoi, who was deeply influenced by the Roma. His brother, Sergei, was married to a Gypsy, and the Roma wife of a distant cousin, Aleksei Tolstoi, provided the model for Anna in War and Peace. Other works by Tolstoi that refer to the Roma yet are not included in Tong's bibliography are A Holy Night and The Living Corpse.

Finally, no work that even touches on Roma cultural influences in eastern Europe or Russia should omit, as Tong has, Franz Liszt's two-volume The Gipsy in Music (1926). Although Tong refers to Liszt twice, she seems unaware of the Roma's deep influence

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