A Radical Dispersal

...officials have acted differently if they knew they were effectively sentencing applicants to death...

...He also describes the Jewish resistance within Germany, including Leftwing groups whose real if quixotic heroism during World War II is too often ignored in Holocaust studies...

...At graduate school, my Princeton classmates included W. (for Werner) Michael Blumenthal...

...Their hesitation is understandable...

...Only by comparison does Great Britain look better...

...They belonged to a wider diaspora notable for its grit and energy, its intelligence and resilience...

...But FDR cannot be absolved from tolerating the State Department's blatant hostility to refugees...

...By the same token, I wish Laqueur had dealt more fully with Arthur Koestler, Hungarian bom but an archetypal Central European...

...This was not wholly the fault of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Still, these are quibbles...

...What these individuals had in common, it seemed to me, was a toughness of spirit chastened by a sobering awareness that chance often determined who survived and who perished...

...Subsequently, of course, he became Secretary of the Treasury...

...Remarkable" seems an understatement...

...Otherwise, the numbers admitted to Britain were pathetically low...

...Later, he became a senior civil servant in the U. S. Treasury...

...Laqueur asks the question without venturing his own answer...

...Would U.S...

...All this is movingly set forth by Walter Laqueur...

...For myself, I wish he had told us more about his own departure from Germany, the fate of his family, and his personal experiences as an exile in Palestine and Britain...

...Commendably, Laqueur, born in Breslau, now presents a composite portrait of his generation, based on letters, interviews and the memoirs of survivors...

...Later, still more curiously, Koestler wrote The Tliirteenth Tribe (1976), claiming that Eastern European Jews were in fact descendants of the Khazars, a warrior people of Turkic stock...

...Army denazification officer to the German town from which his family fled...

...Unemployment was high, and Southern Democrats violently hostile to immigrants controlled key committees in Congress...

...coauthor, with Shareen Brysac, of "Tournament of Shadows" Distilled from what Virgil called the tears of things, Generation Exodus is a work of awesome research about one of history's darkest episodes, yet withal astonishing and to a degree inspiriting...

...His knowledge of German gave him a competitive leg up on his first big foreign assignment, on the Austrian frontier, where he interviewed Hungarians—most of them German speakers—fleeing Soviet tanks in 1956...

...Granted, Arendt was a few years older than those Laqueur focuses on (she was born in 1907), but then she was ahead of her time...

...Ruth" Westheimer and Peter Gay, plus Nobel Prize scientists, numerous sociologists, economists, Freudian analysts, and filmmakers...

...Later, I worked with Max on the Times' Editorial Board...

...The experience made him an opponent of capital punishment and a friend to political prisoners...

...Like many Americans, I have grown up knowing refugees in Laqueur's cohort as friends, colleagues and competitors...

...While a student at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, I listened to Arnold Weiss describe the bittersweet experience of returning as a U.S...

...As a refugee, Koestler was jailed as a suspected enemy alien in both France and Britain, and he faced a death sentence while a prisoner of Franco's Fascists in Spain...

...and Latin America, in Britain, Russia, Palestine, and points east...

...It will serve as a quarry for plays, dissertations and novels about an epic Odyssey rivaled in our time only by the earlier outflow of refugees from Lenin's Russia...

...Leftists who sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union arrived in the midst of the Great Terror and risked forced repatriation during the 1939-41 period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact...

...Himself part of that exodus, the author deals mostly with the remarkable younger generation of German Jews, those who emigrated in their teens or as young adults and have since left a visible mark on much of the world...

...American consulates, as Laqueur writes, "had strict orders to make entry into the United States as difficult as possible by asking for documents that could not be obtained and by rejecting as unsatisfactory affidavits of support that had been provided by relations or friends of the applicants...

...orhertooexactrngjudgment of Israel, Zionism and the Jewish leadership in Germany during the Holocaust, which provoked a polemical storm in the 1960s...

...record was shameful...

...Laqueur's account explains that many hesitated to flee not only for reasons of age, health or money, but out of a misplaced faith that the Nazi nightmare would somehow pass—an illusion that persisted from Hitler's advent in 1933 until the devastating Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938...

...For a fair and detailed accounting, see Bernard Wasserstein's excellent book, Britain and the Jews of Europe, published by the Institute of Jewish Affairs at Oxford in 1979...

...He says hardly a word about Hannah Arendt and her emblematic ambivalence about German culture...

...In 193 8-39,10,000 refugee children left Germany for foster homes in England, the famous Kindertransport...

...It needs saying that prominent Americans, Eleanor Roosevelt creditably among them, did what they could to save lives by circumventing the State Department...

...The U.S...

...Canada, Australia and South Africa together took in fewer German refugees than the city of Shanghai...

...With doors sealed, Jewish refugees went in desperation to any place that would admit them, including such unlikely way stations as Bolivia, the island of Mauritius and Japanese-ruled Shanghai (where no visas were required...

...Nor were British dominions more welcoming...

...He recalled his life during the 1940s in the Shanghai Jewish ghetto, andhis postwar arrival in California where he trained as a croupier in Las Vegas, acquiring a poker face and the means to attend college at Berkeley...

...Tens of thousands migrated legally or illegally to Palestine, then under British mandate, only to be scorned asyekes, the derogatory Yiddish term for German Jews, by Zionists from Eastern Europe...

...Generation Exodus will surely become a standard authority...

...As a young cub reporter at the New York Times, I sat next to a recent Columbia alumnus, Max Franke], who grew up in Manhattan's Washington Heights...

...When Israel attained statehood, Koestler argued in Promise and Fulfillment (1949) that Jews elsewhere had the choice of settling in Israel or abandoning an anachronistic faith...

...Harder to comprehend is the prevailing refusal by most Western democracies to provide even temporary sanctuary to talented young German Jews, or to others under death threat during the Third Reich...

...Her book on Adolf Eichmann, subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil, not only anticipated our era of fourth-rate evildoers like Saddam Hussein and the grubby warlords of Sierra Leone, but also the recent scholarly arguments about the role of "ordinary Germans" in carrying out Hitler's extermination drive...

...During the Hitler years about half of Germany's 500,000 Jews managed to flee, some of them only to be trapped and subsequently killed in Nazi-occupied Europe...

...From 1933 to 1938, only 45,000 immigrants came here from Germany and Austria, although as many as 150,000 might have been legally admitted under existing regulations...

...I regret as well that he did not deal in greater detail with some of the striking figures in this exodus...

...Reviewed by Karl E. Meyer Editor, "World Policy Journal...

...Others ended up in every corner of the earth, a radical dispersal of families and communities, as Walter Laqueur writes, "unprecedented in Jewish history and probably in the history of any other people...

...In the author's judgment, "The overall record leaves a profoundly saddening impression...

...Whatever the agonies of leaving parents and home, however great the miseries of homesickness and instances of cruelty by foster parents, the children survived...

...As a Jew, Koestler seemed locked in a lifetime argument with himself His 1946 novel about Palestine, Thieves in the Night, was dedicated with perverse illogic to the memory of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideological sire of the radical Zionists who turned to terror, but also to Teddy Kollek, a mainstream Labor Zionist moderate...

...The book's organization is broadly geographic, showing how exiles adapted to very different societies in the U.S...

...No matter how else she may have erred, Arendt accurately judged the human capacity for evil, now so apparent in the four corners of our post-Cold War world...

...In the U.S...

...It embraced such diverse figures as Hannah Arendt and Henry Kissinger, Teddy Kollek and Marcus Wolf, "Dr...

...Another classmate, Gerald Pollock, an economist more cheerful than most in his calling, grimly remembered standing at a lofty window in Vienna and watching terrified while crowds cheered the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938...

...a corresponding gesture was meanly blocked in Congress...

...How interesting it wouldhave been to read Laqueur's assessment of this strange pilgrimage...