Review of Karpov’s Brain by Gerald Green (Bantam 1984) 523pp. Gerald Green is perhaps best known as the author of the television drama Holocaust. This was viewed by 500 million people world-wide and certainly no one can dispute the educational value of such an exercise. Yet for many who viewed Holocaust from another level, its over-simplification … Read more
Israel’s Lebanon War. By Zeev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari. Allen & Unwin 12.95. As Israel, in the midst of renewed conflict and violence, painfully attempts to disengage itself from the Lebanese maelstrom, the publication of this book is ironically timely. Written by two of Israel’s leading journalists, it is an objective description of how democratic … Read more
The Military-Industrial Complex in Israel: by Dr Yoram Peri and Amnon Neubach, International Centre for Peace in the Middle East. Israeli Society and its Defence Establishment: The Social and Political Impact of a Protracted Violent Conflict. Ed. Moshe Lissak-Frank Cass. £18. SIPR I Yearbook 1984: World Armaments and Disarmament, Taylor and Francis. “What … Read more
Refuseniks The Jews of Hope: The Plight of Soviet Jewry Today Martin Gilbert Macmillan £8.95 The Yugoslav dissident socialist, Milovan Djilas, once commented that since they are pervaded by the spirit of internationalism, the Jews are doomed to be persecuted whenever a regime isolates itself. Martin Gilbert’s book shows that this dictum remains unchanged. Under … Read more
“If Only My People: Zionism in My life”‘ by Immanuel Jakobovits published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson The title ‘Rabbi’ is conventionally understood to be the Hebrew translation for teacher. Yet originally rabbis were expounders and interpreters of Judaism. Their role became institutionalised in the Middle Ages through absorbing a necessary teaching function as spiritual heads … Read more
Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia By Shimon Redlich (Columbia University Press, 1982, $26.00) NINETEEN EIGHTY THREE marks the fortieth anniversary of the visit of Solomon Mikhoels and Itsik Fefer to this country. The publication of Shimon Redlich’s book on the saga of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) is thus timely and important. In 1943, … Read more
Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovitch ed. Solomon Volkov No Travel like Russian Travel: by Nora Beloff For decades, Dmitri Shostakovich was presented as the personification of all that was best in Soviet culture. On his death in 1975. the accolades from the high and mighty cattle cascading down in a torrent of grief. Behind the … Read more
NO JAIL FOR THOUGHT, by Lev Kopelev. 268 pages. (Seeker and Warburg) £6. Lev Kopelev is best known in the west not so much for his own writing but for his friendship in the camps with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was Kopelev on whom the great author based the character of the idealistic Jewish Communist Rubin … Read more
VORKUTA, by Edward Baca. 352 pages (Constable). 15.95. In 1945, Edward Buca was a 19-year-old member of the Polish Home Army. Poland at the end of the war was no place for an ardent nationalist. The victorious Red Army was in no mood to tolerate an independently-minded man and Buca soon found himself in a … Read more
THE MASARYKS: the making of Czechoslovakia, by Zbynek Zeman. 230 pages (Weidenfeld and Nicholson). £6.50. There has long been a feeling of mutual identification between the peoples of Czechoslovakia and Israel. Both achieved independence during the same period of history after countless centuries in the service of other nations. Since he Second World War, the … Read more