Shai Ansky, The Enemy at his Pleasure

There are three main themes in this book. One -- what the subtitle alludes to -- is a description of the terrible hardships visited on the Jews of Galicia during World War I. Another is a tribute to the tradition of tzedakah, as it was practiced under conditions of great duress: we read about how the Jews of St. Petersburg and Kiev, and community leaders closer to the front, whose own economic condition had become tenuous enough, and at risk of being accused of helping enemy citizens, did what they could to help. The third theme is the author's interactions with Russian officialdom -- the usually hostile, at best mildly concerned army officers whose permission he needed to carry out his mission.

Though there is much of interest in all three themes, I can understand why the first one gets top billing. The Czar's army, whether advancing or retreating, meted out abuse on a grand scale, and if the results were about an order of magnitude less terrible than what came in WWII, that reflected not so much a lack of cruelty as it did the relative organizational skills of WWI Russia versus WWII Germany. And there weren't even twenty good years between the wars; Ansky's story ends in 1917 (and Ansky himself dies in 1920), too soon to describe the horrors of the Russian civil war, which by some accounts exceeded those of WWI, as far as the civilian Jewish population of (eastern) Galicia was concerned. (For further reading, if more literary than historical, I'd recommend S.I.Agnon's A Guest for the Night: A Novel (Library Of World Fiction) .)

I have a few complaints. At times, the editing is a bit unpolished, the chronology of what came first and what came next a little ambiguous. I don't know how much that comes from Ansky, and how much from the translator. In fact I'm not so sure about the translator; a few times it seems he misunderstood some Hebrew/Judaic terminology. A few maps would have helped too; we can all find Lwow, Tarnow, Brody and Kiev on a map, but the book mentions a lot of smaller places (whose names might have changed a few times since then) that I could not find. If I knew where they were, that would have helped clear up some of the chronological ambiguity I mentioned above. Or maybe I didn't try hard enough; I might make another go at this and try drawing a map showing all the places mentioned, with arrows tracing Ansky's travels. At least the book comes with a good index.

Adam Zamoyski, Poland: a History

 This appears to be the biggest general history of Poland in print now, in English. I enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Nonetheless, it's odd that a book as serious-minded as this includes no footnotes, references, or bibliography. I guess we're supposed to take Zamoyski's word for it that this is how and why it happened. Most of the time, he seems reasonable enough. On the other hand, as I come to this with little background on Poland, I really can't say if the book is mostly reliable or mostly unreliable.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he hasn't said anything that's flatly wrong. But between what's completely, utterly wrong, and what is absolutely, totally, universally true, you have a pretty broad spectrum that takes in the mostly true, the debatably true, the controversial, and the arguably false. To sort those out, it helps a lot to know an author's sources. Let's take an example. On page 305, he says,

"Hostility towards the Jews was inadvertently heightened by American and British Jewish pressure groups at the Paris peace talks of 1919. It was at their insistence that states such as Poland were made to sign 'Minority Treaties', which subjected their treatment of their Jewish citizens to international scrutiny. In Poland, with its long tradition of toleration, this was seen as an insult."

Well, how does he know this? What does it mean at all? That is, whose hostility -- was there a public opinion poll, perhaps an angry pamphlet by Dmowski, perhaps just something floating around Polish aristocratic circles?

Claims as to the intentions of a nation or its government are even harder to assess, without some attribution. On page 294, for example, Zamoyski turns to the causes of the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, and he writes,

"When the Whites had been defeated, in the winter of 1919, the Bolsheviks began to prepare for exporting the revolution through Poland to Germany."

Well, did Lenin or one of his lieutenants say that? Was it a rogue operation by the internationally-oriented Trotsky? Or was it mostly a pretext Pilsudski offered up to justify his campaign in the east? (Davies Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present , despite evidently strong pro-Polish sympathies, suggests the latter.) The plain military facts -- a Polish drive deep into the Ukraine followed by a counterattack of the "Red Cavalry" -- don't necessarily suggest a Soviet plan to drive "through Poland to Germany". Moreover, the early Soviet state was exhausted at that point, its domestic enemies by no means fully defeated and other fringes of the Czar's empire yet to be subdued; a military adventure into Germany seems like quite a stretch. Now, I'm no fan of the Bolsheviks, and I could be convinced Zamoyski is right on this, but I can't just take his word for it.

Zamoyski put a lot of effort into this book. For not that much more effort (he must have notes...) he could have produced a much better book.

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