Word: holocaustal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...short story with the title "Under the Big Sky." It was to be "an end of the world sort of thing." An anthropologist was going to be out in the desert somewhere, studying an obscure nomad tribe, when the rest of the world was destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. Suddenly these people living on the margins of the world, ignored by humanity, were propelled onto center stage--they were the only humans left, and the anthropologist's view of them changed completely...
...attitude was labeled racism. But the term can hardly embrace attacks as diverse as those on black Americans in New York City, North African workers in Italy, Arab immigrants in France, Romanies (Gypsies) in Czechoslovakia, Hungarians in Romania. Very few Jews are left in Central Europe after Hitler's Holocaust, but the anti-Semitism that lay dormant under communist repression has sprung back to life. The best word to describe the whole sickening phenomenon may simply be bigotry...
Strangest of all, while Miller devotes most of her chapters mainly to Gentile distortions and evasions, she writes about American reactions as though the Holocaust were purely a Jewish question. "While it is now evident that the United States did not do enough to prevent the genocide in Europe . . . the Holocaust is not an American experience," she claims. "Americans did not do it, nor were they its targets or victims." But it was President Roosevelt who did nothing to increase the immigration quotas, and the State Department that refused to fill even those narrow quotas, and the U.S. Congress that...
...whenever we examine those terrible years, we do not find very many people with clean hands. But what does Miller's subtitle Facing the Holocaust actually mean? What are we asking when we demand that people "confront" or "deal with" such a disaster? The Holocaust certainly can and should be studied, analyzed, remembered, but memory is of rather limited value. Even after all that has been said about it, in anger or in sorrow, the Holocaust cannot really be understood -- or expiated...
...Richler has employed a unique blend of humor, history and myth. Here his mixture is richer and darker than before. He is a ringmaster, making his performers do dazzling backflips without missing a beat. At the same time he is a moralist, recoiling from those who would sentimentalize the Holocaust or make power a sacrament. In the middle of the journey, Bernard Gursky seeks a biographer. "For this job," he booms, "I don't want a Canadian. I want the best." He got both...