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Title details for Stolen Words by Mark Glickman - Available

Stolen Words

The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books

by Mark Glickman
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Stolen Words is an epic story about the largest collection of Jewish books in the world—tens of millions of books that the Nazis looted from European Jewish families and institutions. Nazi soldiers and civilians emptied Jewish communal libraries, confiscated volumes from government collections, and stole from Jewish individuals, schools, and synagogues. Early in their regime the Nazis burned some books in spectacular bonfires, but most they saved, stashing the literary loot in castles, abandoned mine shafts, and warehouses throughout Europe. It was the largest and most extensive book-looting campaign in history. After the war, Allied forces discovered these troves of stolen books but quickly found themselves facing a barrage of questions. How could the books be identified? Where should they go? Who had the authority to make such decisions? Eventually the military turned the books over to an organization of leading Jewish scholars called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.—whose chairman was the acclaimed historian Salo Baron and whose on-the-ground director was the philosopher Hannah Arendt—with the charge of establishing restitution protocols. Stolen Words is the story of how a free civilization decides what to do with the material remains of a world torn asunder, and how those remains connect survivors with their past. It is the story of Jews struggling to understand the new realities of their post-Holocaust world and of Western society's gradual realization of the magnitude of devastation wrought by World War II. Most of all, it is the story of people —of Nazi leaders, ideologues, and Judaica experts; of Allied soldiers, scholars, and scoundrels; and of Jewish communities, librarians, and readers around the world.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 1, 2016

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780827612761
      • File size: 3298 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780827612761
      • File size: 3298 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      November 15, 2015
      The odyssey of Jewish books in the wake of the Holocaust. Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men (2008) has increased awareness of Allied efforts to track down and save art and artifacts stolen by the Nazis. In a related but more specific vein, Glickman (Sacred Treasure--The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic, 2010), a rabbi, traces the fate of Jewish books from the outset of Nazi vandalism through the course of World War II and beyond. While the Nazis were noted for burning books, the author explains that this wanton destruction was actually quite limited. The Nazis were far more interested in hoarding books owned by Jewish families, libraries, and institutions, and they did so by the millions. "The Nazis devoted so much attention to Jewish books because Germans were a bookish people," writes Glickman, "and they understood the importance of the printed word to cultural identity and ethnic pride." The Nazis hoped to destroy Jewish culture by stealing and suppressing its written words, but their motives did not end there. Representative of the Nazi penchant for pseudo-science, many Nazi scholars hoped to study Jewish texts for academic, yet misguided reasons. From a material perspective, they also mined book collections for rare and valuable specimens, much as was done with art during the same period. At the war's end, the job of collecting, cataloging, and redistributing these books fell to a few dedicated scholars and professionals, including such important figures as Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt. Glickman has produced a provocative history that preserves this important yet often overlooked aspect of the Holocaust, and readers will come away with a valuable perspective on how the written word can be abused for the sake of cultural genocide. At times, the narrative is chronologically confusing, and the author's voice can become a slight annoyance in an otherwise serious framework--e.g., a surprising plethora of exclamation marks. The text is approachable and the material is invaluable. The written word prevails.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

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Languages

  • English

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