From the Shtetl to Ellis Island

...He gives some attention to those refugees who set out for Palestine under the influence of theproto-Zionist Bilu movement (the name is a Hebrew Biblical acrosticof "House of Jacob, let us go") but his greatest stress is on the far larger number who crossed the Atlantic to the United States...

...It was at this precise point that American public opinion turned decisively against the "new" immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe...

...Ignoring the new historiographical techniques, he tells us in his Preface that he has written a "story": the story of Jewish wandering and resettlement...

...But Sanders manages to convey it with freshness and verve...

...How can the President be accused of indifference to Jewish suffering, asks the author, when "few of his contemporaries were inclined to blame him for that" and many, Jew and non-Jew alike, "continued to praise him...

...The secret of his success is his dextrous use of eyewitness accounts...

...Whether or not they are more accurate than traditional history, their subordination of narrative, their frequently blatant polemical aims and their propensity to lapse into jargon have gradually narrowed their audience: The ordinary educated lay person rarely reads the books that professional historians write today...

...And Sanders writes quite warmly of those, in and out of government, who opposed the Administration on refugee policy and urged a more liberal interpretation of the rules...

...To apportion degrees of culpability among those who opposed that evil may be morally impossible...

...Then, in 1939, the British government virtually closed off Jewish immigration to Palestine, leavingmuchof European Jewry trapped...

...These contrasting perceptions of the very same place at the very same time provide a fascinating insight into how our sense of reality depends on our personal circumstances...

...A strict quota system for different nationality groups, put in place in 1924, substantially reduced the number of Jews coming to the United States: while 50,000 Jews arrived in 1921, a little over 10,000 reached these shores three years later...

...Shores of Refuge proceeds chronologically, covering the devastation wreaked by World War I in the East European heartland, where so many Jews lived, and the terrible slaughter of Jews that occurred after the War when Poles, Ukrainians and all sides in the Russian Civil War blamed Jews for their problems...

...Thus a single chapter intersperses two accounts of conditions for Jewish immigrants at a certain stage in the long journey to America...

...Here Sanders gives us selections from Sholom Aleichem's subsequent fictional portrayal of a Jew's trip to America, full of suffering and anxiety, side-by-side with that author's real-life experience as a celebrity immigrant who travelled cabin class and did not even have to stop at Ellis Island...

...Although they might differ over what happened and why, the ground rules of the game required them to make their cases through the medium of publication...

...In the face of such a fury," writes Ronald Sanders, "and of the heroism that defeated it—a calculus of human virtues is very hard to apply...

...Nazism itself was evil incarnate...

...Most surprising to me was the discovery that three Jewish refugee relief organizations consolidated after World War II, perhaps the only time in history Jewish agencies voluntarily merged to avoid duplicating each other's efforts...

...With the rise of Nazism and the expansion of Germany in the 1930s, the American quota system, and the unnecessarily restrictive way it was enforced, deprived European Jews of a needed haven...

...He stresses all the factors that made it difficult to transcend the quota system and help more Jewish refugees: the high unemployment rate, popular fears that refugees could be enemy spies, a deep reluctance to push toward any goal that might divert energies from the War effort, the inability of anyone to conceive, till the end of 1942, that an actual extermination policy was possible...

...Sanders also can use the juxtaposition of sources to surprise his readers...

...While he thanks HIAS for allowing him access to its archives, he quotes almost exclusively from published sources: newspapers (mostly the New York Times and the London Jewish Chronicle), autobiographical works and reports of immigrant aid societies...

...Can Sanders be unaware that a skilled politician is capable of leading people to believe he agrees with them, even while he carries out policies that do not further their interests...

...But the book shows us also how one man in the State Department, Breckenridge Long, managed to restrict the entry of refugees even beyond the letter of the law, right under the President's nose...

...Sizeable chunks of primary source material are arranged in an entertaining, enlightening, sometimes dramatic sequence, tied together by the author's own bridging paragraphs...

...One instructive example: Historians differ over whether Hitler's program to exterminate Jewry was simply a byproduct of the conditions created by the outbreak ofWorldWar II, or rather a carefully planned "war within a war"—in the wordsof Lucy Dawidowicz, a"war against the Jews" that Hitler largely won by killing off the majority of European Jewry...

...Sanders prefers to avoid them...

...Later in the book we meet Sholom Aleichem, the great Yiddish writer who left Russia for the United States in 1905...

...Sanders, a professional writer who did graduate work in the discipline but (perhaps fortunately) did not finish his PhD, combines an engaging writing style with solid grounding in the sources to produce an admirable treatment of a central theme—maybe the central theme—of modern Jewish history...

...Readers will stand in awe of people like Charles Netter, Michael Heilprin and Alexander Harkavy, who eagerly took upon themselves the burden of helping refugees, carrying out the traditional Jewish obligation of helping fellow Jews in need...

...In several illuminating chapters, Sanders analyzes the behavior and motivation of Jewish leaders in Central and Western Europe and in the United States who were confronted by this mass of immigrants...

...The reason simple narrative mixed with primary sources cannot work once one gets into the 1930s is that serious issues of historical interpretation arise which a writer must face...

...Sanders cites all the evidence he can find of Roosevelt's interest in helping Jews, as indications that he did care...

...Sanders cannot make up his mind on this pivotal question...

...Large parts of this story have been told before...

...Cliometrics—statistical analysis often done with the aid of computers—Marxism, feminist history, psychohistory, are some forms this tendency takes...

...Traditionally—from ancient Greece until quite recently—most historians saw their role as providing a coherent narrative of the past and offering convincing explanations for what had occurred...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Director of Publications, American Jewish Committee The honorable discipline of history is in turmoil...

...In calling his section on the Holocaust "The War of Annihilation" heseems to indicate sympathy for the Dawidowicz thesis, yet his emphasis on the contingent and unpremeditated sequence of Nazi anti-Jewish measures argues the opposite...

...He presents a clear account of the frequently confused Jewish organizational responses to the challenge of feeding, housing and advising the newcomers—especially the events behind the founding and development of what came to be known as HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped Sanders secure the funding for this book...

...It is on the subject of the Roosevelt Administration's refugee policy that Sanders' unwillingness to take a stand is most evident...

...History was a branch of literature...

...At the very end of his Afterword Sanders mounts a much better defense in the form of an observation that is worth pondering...

...He begins a chapter on German antiSemitism in the 1920s with someviolently anti-Jewish quotations that illustrate the atmosphere making possible the assassination of Walter Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister...

...To his credit, Sanders recognizes the problem in this part of the book and tries to deal with it in an Afterword that is mostly a defense of Roosevelt...

...Sanders' study is ambitiously broad...

...One is impressed by the willingness of the United States to take in so many refugees before World War I, and by Russia's enthusiastic willingness to let Jews out: Today, ironically, each has shifted its stand, with American authorities seeking to limit the inflow of people, and the Tsar's Soviet successors reluctant to let Jews go...

...Sanders synthesizes the material so well that his words and those of his sources blend together to carry the narrative forward in a natural, unforced manner...

...Responding to trends in the social sciences and in the overall cultural climate, historians now tend to utilize technical methods and theoretical frameworks that are supposed to render their work "scientific...

...He begins with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and shows how the anti-Semitic inclinations in Russia came to the surface after some years of quiescence...

...The magnetic effect of President Roosevelt's charm on American Jews is well known, and it had little, if anything, to do with specifically pro-Jewish policies...

...Only on one topic does Sanders' approach fail him: the Holocaust and its repercussions...

...Occasionally Sanders uses his sources contrapuntally, and the effect is the literary equivalent of a Bach fugue...

...That approach to history is currently on the defensive...

...Sporadic pogroms often condoned by people in high places, and government enactments severely restricting Jewish economic life induced hundreds of thousands of Jews to leave Russia between 1881 and World War I. Having set the background, Sanders sympathetically portrays what it was like for Jews to uproot themselves and make the arduous trip across the border —usually, in the early years, to the city of Brody in Austrian Galicia—thence to a German port, and out to sea...

...He then cites "a writer in 1897" who expressed similar sentiments about Jews, and who turns out to be none other than Rathenau, a man deeply ambivalent about his Jewishness...

...To read Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman and Beard, or their less talented contemporaries, required no specialized training...

...The book closes with a quick review of Jewish migration to the United States since the end of World War II, and of how American Jewish resettlement agencies have helped the most recent arrivals adjust to their new surroundings...

...Happily, in Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration, Ronald Sanders demonstrates that good narrative history is alive and well, albeit outside the walls of academe...

...Sanders neither preaches nor draws explicit lessons, leaving the reader a good deal to think about...

...One of them is a cool, detached description by a neutral observer, the other a heart-rending recollection by a refugee...

...Always in principle, and often in practice, the works of historians were accessible to the average educated lay person...

...Sanders traces the evolution of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's refugee policy...

...In other hands this technique might give the impression of a scissors-and-paste job...

...Onestrainsto imagine what life was like in Eastern European communities where the Jews often made up half or more of the population...