Politics of Memory

This is the poignant memoir of a man who has spent most of his lifetime immersed in the evidence of one of the great horrors in human history. It is both a record of how it affected him and a revelation of the surprising ways in which his monumental work was received by his contemporaries. Even after thirty-five years Raul Hilberg's <I>The Destruction of the European Jews</I> remains the most distinguished and comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. Yet at the time it was written as Mr. Hilberg recounts in <I>The Politics of Memory</I> both the manuscript and its subject matter were rejected by major publishers and university presses; and in the wake of publication the author faced a hostile reception from those who refused to believe that the Jews were less than heroic in their journey to the gas chambers. How his study was used and abused-especially by Hannah Arendt Lucy Dawidowicz and Nora Levin-draws Mr. Hilberg's attention as does the more admiring reception for <I>Destruction</I> in Europe than in America. <I>The Politics of Memory</I> brings full circle a scholarly enterprise that in many ways has been a terrible calling. A courageous powerful portrait of one scholar's self-directed search for truth.-<I>Toronto Globe and Mail</I>.