The Archive Thief

By Lisa Moses Leff,

Book cover of The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust

Book description

Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Zosa Szajkowski (Shy-KOV-ski) was a self-made man who managed to make a life for himself as an intellectual, first as a journalist in 1930s Paris, and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a scholar. Although he never…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Archive Thief as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Leff’s book is the story of a Polish-born historian of French Jewish history who first salvaged lost documents after the Holocaust before eventually coming to steal and resell them to US and Israeli libraries and archives.

A great read, the book is the best kind of biography: it offers a vivid image of a largely forgotten group of post-Holocaust scholars and raises big questions about who has the right to own historical documents and the way their assembly determines what we know about the past.

I found this book inspiring because it shows how exciting a story about archives and…

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Book cover of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

No Average Day by Rona Simmons,

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.

The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on…

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