Fans pick 100 books like The Great Departure

Yuri Slezkine’s classic book on the history of Russian Jewry is not a work of migration history strictly speaking. But there is no Jewish history without migration, and Slezkine shows us, among many other things, how Russian Jews ended up in the US, Israel, and the Soviet Union, representing three ideological choices—liberalism, nationalism, and communism.

I read this book back in university, and few works, if any, have had such a profound impact on my historical thinking.

During the years immediately following World War II, around a quarter of a million Jewish Holocaust survivors gathered in displaced persons camps and other places in Allied-occupied Germany. Atina Grossmann examines the complicated and unexpected interactions between those Jewish refugees and their German neighbors and American occupation soldiers, exploring political and ideological questions as well as details of everyday life, with a particular focus on the role of gender and sexuality. Paying attention to multiple voices and perspectives, Grossmann brings to life the hardships, dilemmas, ironies, and hopes of postwar displacement and reconstruction. 

In this short book of essays, Joseph Roth, author of the great novel The Radetzky March, describes the efforts of Eastern European Jews to find new homes in the West following the turmoils of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Roth reports on interwar Jewish life in shtetls in Eastern Europe and in what he calls “ghettos in the West” such as Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, as well as in America and the Soviet Union. He writes with sympathy about “ordinary people” forced out of their homes at a time of growing restrictions on international movement and mounting animosity towards migrants in many countries. 

During the first few years after Israel’s establishment in 1948, the country’s population was doubled by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants, many of whom had been forced to leave their former countries following persecution and other pressures. Immigrant absorption in Israel, however, was fraught with conflicts, due, inter alia, to a lack of resources and the mistreatment of immigrants, especially those from Muslim countries. Orit Bashkin concentrates on the 123,000 Iraqi Jews who moved to Israel during that period, recounting the discrimination and poor living conditions they faced, but also their struggles for civil rights and human dignity. The book connivingly questions the idea of Israel as a melting pot for all Jews, and sheds a broader light on the rupture of migration and the ability of migrants to resist state policies.    

Hans Jonas was born in 1903 in Mönchengladbach, studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger in the 1920s, and after Hitler’s rise to power left Germany for British Mandate Palestine, where he enlisted in the Zionist Haganah militia. During World War II he served in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade and then fought in the 1948 Arab-Jewish war in Palestine. After demobilization, he could not secure a permanent academic position in newly established Israel, and moved to Canada and then to the United States, where in 1955, he accepted a professorship at the New School of Social Research in New York, eventually becoming a prominent philosopher and public intellectual. His beautifully written memoir illuminates the impact of migration and the upheavals of the 20th century on the life of a Jewish intellectual. 

Histories of migration to Germany are often stories of problems and failure, of racism and troubled integration. This book does not negate these problems but consciously strives to develop a positive narrative of how migration–both emigration and immigration–is an integral part of German history.

Unlike most other scholars of migration, who envisage a post-national future of German society, Jan Plamper tries to develop a vision of positive national identification with a modern German nation that builds on the insight that “we are all migrants.” It is the last book the author, a dear friend of mine, wrote before his untimely passing in 2023 and will hopefully be his lasting legacy.

Tom Segev is one of the once “new” Israeli historians who, in the 1980s, began writing a critical history of their young state. I particularly like this portrait he drew of early Israel, which fought for independence and statehood against external aggression and took in hundreds of thousands of new immigrants within a short period of time.

It is not an idealized account, and it talks, for instance, about the selective nature of early Israeli immigration policy–a topic I also touched upon in my book. Emblematic for the complex history of Israel, a country forged from migration, is the author’s dedication of the English translation, published in 1986, to his mother, an immigrant from Germany “who never learnt Hebrew properly and could not read this book until it came out in English.” 

I have only recently read this book, but I already count it among my favorites.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, the great social historian of the Soviet Union, turns to the topic of migration to tell the story of the “Russians”—an ambiguous category she problematizes in her book—who made it to Australia after the Second World War. Some came from Europe, others from China, and all of them had complicated and often dramatic journeys behind them.

Fitzpatrick writes this quite unknown history with the analytical mind of the social historian, a great sense of human touch and storytelling—and against the backdrop of her own recent return migration to Australia after decades abroad. 

This gem of narrative non-fiction tells the improbable story of an utterly impoverished immigrant woman who married into one of the wealthiest “establishment” families of New York City and became one of the nation’s most prominent radical activists in the early 1900s. The unlikely marriage of Rose Pastor and Graham Stokes made many national headlines -- and attracted attention from federal agents. Hochschild brings this odd couple to life in all their ups and downs, introduces us to their circle of famous fellow activists, and illuminates their fights for social justice, struggles that remain relevant to this day.

Golding will forever be remembered for Lord of the Flies, but I think this is better (and so did he, apparently, a lot better).

It’s the story of people on a seemingly endless voyage from England to Australia in the 19th century, but for me, it’s like a spaceship on a voyage to another planet, like the spaceship in Alien with its own monsters aboard, the social mores, the injustices, the class privileges and prejudices, the sexual hangups, and the guilty secrets they carry with them. Pity poor Australia!

For me, it demonstrates that the sea can be a metaphor for reading (and writing). You embark on a journey, and you want to get to the end, but in a way, you want it to last forever.