100 books like The Wandering Jews

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. 

The Great Departure demonstrates how Jewish migration can be better understood against the backdrop of a larger migration story – in this case, that of the approximately 55 million Europeans who moved to the Americas between the mid-19th and the mid-20th centuries. Tara Zahra’s study of this mass movement also reveals the importance of investigating not only the arrival of migrants to their new destinations but also the policies and debates surrounding departure from and even return to the old country. This wide-ranging book combines moving stories of individuals and families with discussions of big ideas concerning freedom, nationalism, and global economic dynamics, while also challenging the common image of America as a paradise for immigrants. 

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. 

My family fled Iran a couple years after the Islamic Revolution, but growing up, my parents didn’t talk about that period in their life all that much. It was sort of like my friend whose dad never talked about Vietnam. So, even though I was born in Iran post-revolution, I didn’t learn much about the history of the Shah’s downfall until I read Marjane Satrapi’s incredible graphic novels – Persepolis, Books One and Two. Satrapi manages to create a funny and heartbreaking memoir about her adolescence during the revolution and her life as a young ex-pat living in Paris. 

Follow it up with her graphic novella, Embroideries—which delves into the sex lives of Iranian women. Another topic that was generally off-limits in our household.

For me the best book on walking is by the German film director Werner Herzog.

In 1974 Herzog was told that his friend, the film historian Lotte Eisner, was dying. In what can perhaps be described as a fugue state Herzog pulled on his boots, grabbed a jacket and compass, and set off on a monumental, almost shamanic, journey from his home in Munich to her deathbed in Paris, believing his act of walking would keep her alive.

The journey took three weeks and Herzog walked through the thick of winter. On arrival, Eisner had already recovered. Of Walking in Ice is Herzog’s diary charting this incredible pilgrimage. Tender, beautiful, and genuinely insightful, I’ve read this short book over and over again. It’s probably time I read it again!

The image of the female spy should have been Marthe McKenna and women spies like her.  Instead, because of a nude dancer from The Netherlands, the popular but unfair image of a spy in spy thrillers and Hollywood films is often that of a devious seductress. The nude dancer’s stage name was Mata Hari, who became the mistress to senior French officers and officials during the war. She may have pretended to spy for both sides to earn money, but revealed no significant secrets. Nonetheless in 1917, the French accused her of being a German spy who had used her seductive talents to obtain secrets that sent tens of thousands of French soldiers to their deaths. The evidence at her trial came nowhere close to proving the accusation, but the French needed a scapegoat for the mutiny and collapse of much of their army. She was convicted, executed by firing… show more.

Apart from viewing the late Paddy Ashdown as perhaps the best Prime Minister Britain never had, I also know him as an under-recognised author of gripping Second World War books. The community of WW2 researchers is mutually supportive; knowledgeable colleagues have been immensely helpful to me over the years, and I recall helping Paddy with some information for one of his books. Several of them are worth reading, but here he tells the true stories of three men who pitted their wits against each other in the treacherous milieu of wartime France. The stakes were measured in lives, betrayals, and deaths.

I have always adored the Chanel brand and have been intrigued by Coco Chanel’s childhood story and her rise to fame. Then to read the back story of her activities during World War 2 in Paris, I was gutted. The author depicts her as a full-on collaborator. All done in a bid to save her fortune, but at the expense of others. In this explosive narrative the author pieces together Chanel’s hidden years, her relationships with top-ranking Nazis, and her anti-Semitism.  

Another benefit of teaching through simulation is to show that history’s outcomes are not preordained. All of May’s works, but especially this one, stress the contingent nature of history. There was nothing inevitable about Germany’s victory over France in 1940. On the contrary, that victory was unlikely. May lays out a solid case that France ought to have won, and then takes care to dissect the circumstances that contributed to its defeat.