Books Briefly

Hal Elliott Wert, Hoover vs. Roosevelt: Two Presidents’ Battle Over Feeding Europe and Going to War (Essex, UK: Stackpole Books, 2023), xviii + 452 pp., bibliography, index, images. ISBN 978-08-117-3972-6 (hbk).Many of this journal's readers are likely to be at least somewhat familiar with President Herbert Hoover's humanitarian efforts throughout his life, including those in Poland after Versailles, and for Poles during World War II. Hal Elliott Wert, a scholar of Hoover's life and legacy, aims to bring more attention to these efforts, as well as the complicated relationship between Hoover and his successor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover's successful direction of private aid to Belgium during World War I convinced President Woodrow Wilson to place him over the US Food Administration. It was during this time that he befriended Roosevelt, who was serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Hoover would later direct the congressionally funded American Relief Administration in the Interwar period, providing aid to the Second Polish Republic (as well as the early Soviet Union). After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Roosevelt sought Hoover's expertise in organizing aid efforts abroad, though their friendship had soured during the election of 1932. Wert deftly tells the story of how FDR could not be seen openly engaging his greatest political foe for advice, while he desperately wanted Hoover's expertise. Soon, however, with the fall of Eastern Poland to the Soviets, Roosevelt shifted his attentions to assuring US neutrality, while Hoover fell back on previous networks (including contacts within European branches of the YMCA) to develop the private Commission on Polish Relief (CPR) to bring aid to occupied Poland, and Polish refugees elsewhere in Europe. Throughout the text, Wert notes that Hoover's efforts were not entirely altruistic, hoping aid efforts would help him regain domestic political footing. Hoover vs. Roosevelt tells a remarkably detailed story of American efforts to aid Poles in Europe during the war (including background on networks developed during World War I and the early interwar period), while also presenting the complicated relationship between the two political rivals. It is a valuable text for both those interested in American political history, and (more importantly for this journal's readership) for those interested in the American-led humanitarian efforts for Poles from 1919 to the end of 1941. (db)Donna Chmara, Surviving Genocide: Personal Recollections (Point Pleasant, NJ: Winged Hussar Publishing, 2023), 352 pp., questions for discussion, suggested readings, bibliography, appendices. ISBN 978-19-504-2380-4 (hbk).This book started as a project to document the experiences of Donna Chmara's extended family, from the town of Naliboki in present-day Belarus. While most of the subjects of the individual chapters are directly related to the author, all but one of the unrelated subjects are either from the Naliboki area or members of the Polish diaspora in New Jersey and acquaintances of the author. The notable exception is in chapter 16, which is an interview between Chmara and Czesław Miłosz. In the introduction, Chmara notes that this text focuses on the plight of Christian, Roman Catholic Poles across the war years. Later, in prefacing the interview with Miłosz, Chmara notes that it was his works and encouragement that inspired her to draw together these accounts and publish this project. The prominent historian Norman Davies provides the foreword. What follows is a book in three parts. The first presents accounts of those that had their lives changed by the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland. Some were deported further into the Soviet Union, while others quite literally “dug-in,” living in trenches in the Naliboki Forest. The second part examines the experiences of ethnic Poles forcibly deported to Germany to work in agriculture, manufacturing, or as domestic servants (including the author and her parents and siblings), after the Nazi invasion of Soviet-occupied areas. The third section of the book focuses on resistance. Here we see chapters on Stefan and Krystyna, noting their roles in the Polish military in exile and underground, respectively. This is followed by the interview with Miłosz, and a final chapter recounting part of Father Hyacinth Dombrowski's life moving through appointments in Catholic Churches in occupied Poland, before he was sent to Auschwitz and suffered medical experimentation. The experiences within are often heart-wrenching, but the book also shows moments of the goodness of humanity. Almost all of the subjects survived due to kindness from unexpected individuals. It is unclear, at times, the relationship between the subjects and the author, particularly when they are not related, and the book would have benefitted from further editing. However, it is a great resource for first-hand accounts of the wide range of Polish survival during World War II. The accounts are summarized from Chmara's meetings with the subjects, often followed by short excerpts of direct interviews. (db)Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), xiv + 348 pp., maps, index. ISBN 978-03-002-5707-6 (hbk).This book is not an autobiography, Timothy Garton Ash notes in the introduction. The “personal” in the title refers to the main source(s) for the book, the author's own diaries, notes, keepsakes, and mementos gathered across a lifetime studying Europe. That being said, the very nature of these sources makes the book at the least very autobiographical, as discussions of major events are intertwined with personal revelations and professional regrets. The text is broken into five main sections: Destroyed (1945), Divided (1961–1979), Rising (1980–1989), Triumphing (1990–2007), and Faltering (2008–2022). The events framing these sections are easily apparent to the readers of this journal, given the dates. Each section has multiple, short, unnumbered chapters, usually built around a vignette from Garton Ash's life (ranging from a summer job escorting British youths across the Mediterranean Sea, to meetings with heads of state from around the globe). A recurring theme throughout the text is the struggle of European leaders to promote unity in collective groups like NATO and the EU, while simultaneously embracing diversity within their countries and between them. Almost every major event in Europe from 1945 to 2022 is at least mentioned, from the end of World War II to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. European connections to events like 9/11 are explored for more than just their drawing of European soldiers into US-led conflicts. As is often the case, the value in reading Garton Ash's work is the overarching connections he excels at making. For example, while noting that all of the seemingly regressive events since 2008 (the economic crash in that year, Crimea in 2014, the rise of populist movements in Hungary and Poland, etc.) all have their own individual causes, these causes are often “mutually reinforcing” (p. 246). Another noteworthy assessment is that the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine is undoubtedly the end of the “post-Wall” period in Europe, with citizens of Ukraine once again experiencing attempted oppression from the east, as they had during World War II and after. Readers of this journal will also appreciate the author's frequent return to Polish themes. Overall, Garton Ash still believes in the concept of Europe, even despite recent regression, citing how far the continent has come in the last 80 years. Readers may find that he puts into words many of the feelings and trends they have felt and seen observing Europe across that time period. (db)Mark Celinscak and Mehnaz Afridi, eds., Global Approaches to the Holocaust: Memory, History, and Representation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2025), x + 297 pp., index. ISBN 978-14-962-3068-3 (pbk).In the ever-expanding landscape of research and publications on the Holocaust it is rare to see a collected volume with as novel of an approach as this book. Global Approaches to the Holocaust is an outstanding collection of essays covering how the event is remembered, studied, and represented around the world outside of Europe. There are three sections—Memory, History, and Representation, with the overall goal of interpreting the Holocaust as a global event, past, present, and future. In many cases, the connections between the Holocaust and the nations represented in the chapters are similar to those in chapter 5, which deals with the memory of Nazi victims and survivors who immigrated to Chile before, during, and after the Holocaust in Europe. Other chapters remind us that the Holocaust was global, even as it was happening. Aomar Boum's excellent chapter discussing music and poems in North Africa, for example, draws attention to antisemitic policies faced by Jewish residents of Morocco, Algeria, and other Vichy-controlled North African territories during World War II. Still, other chapters focus on countries with their own difficult legacies of oppression, or those that experienced collective guilt at limiting the immigration of Jews fleeing Europe and the Nazis. The penultimate chapter, chapter 16, by Ann Beaglehole, meaningfully confronts New Zealand, which falls into both of those categories. The value of this book is twofold. First, it provides important comparative information for how the Holocaust is addressed, memorialized, or in some cases ignored, across more than fifteen countries. This alone makes the book incredibly useful for comparison to the multitude of studies engaging with memorialization and education across Europe. Secondly, a number of the chapters provide recommendations for the future (especially in those countries where a lack of education or memorialization is present). Navras J. Aafreedi's chapter engaging with how the popularity of Hitler, Holocaust denialism, and anti-Semitism go hand in hand with severely limited education about the Holocaust in India and South Asia is particularly chilling. This volume is very ambitious, covering countries in North and South America, Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and Oceania. While some cases may be familiar to readers, the book is a must-read for those interested in Holocaust memory, education, and representation. (db)Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), xi + 620 pp., bibliographical references, index. ISBN 978-0674296084 (hbk).There is no shortage of advice for anyone who wishes to sample recent scholarship on Czesław Miłosz, one of the twentieth century's most iconic poets. The literary genres Miłosz mastered or attempted to master during his long career include the novel, drama, essay, memoir, autobiography, and letter, but it is poetry that has earned him international recognition. The commentary surrounding his extensive and wide-ranging work is correspondingly vast. New critical studies appear on what has begun to feel like a monthly basis. Recent additions include Cosmic Connections by Charles Taylor who devotes his arguably most enthusiastic chapter to Miłosz. Conceived as a companion volume to The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (2016), Cosmic Connections is Taylor's contribution to current conversations about the climate crisis and our dependence on the natural world. While acknowledging the great advances that the natural sciences have made over the last three centuries, Taylor turns to poetry to explore “something real and important in our relation to our natural environment, something that we need to understand better, appreciate more fully, and in the end cherish more strongly—if this relation is not to turn terminally lethal” (p. 596). His discussion focuses on some ten canonical poets, all of them white men. Part 5 of Cosmic Connections, “The Modernist Turn,” pairs T. S. Eliot (in chapter 13) with Miłosz (in chapter 14). Beginning with the recognition that Christian faith is in dynamic struggle with doubt in Miłosz's writings, Taylor sets out to analyze the aspiration to cosmic connection in his poetry. Along the way, Taylor offers an overview of some of the key themes that emerge from Miłosz's work: his critical Catholicism, his skepticism about Polish rebellions launched in the face of hopeless odds, and his rejection of the dominant form of Polish nationalism, marred by a streak of antisemitism. The chapter on Miłosz closes with an effusive tribute to his poetry that, in Taylor's view, “helped inspire that union of the Church and the Left in Poland which brought about the nonviolent resistance movement Solidarność; which in turn played an important role in overturning the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe” (pp. 549–550). (hf)