306
PARTISAN REVIEW
We will never know just how many Germans and Austrians were glad
to benefit from the removal of the Jews, from the confiscation of their prop–
erty. But we do know that former Socialists and Communists who might
have wanted to resist did not and could not do so once the killing machinery
was in place. Had they objected, the Nazi leaders who never lacked the
manpower to service these machines would have "processed" them as well.
And we also know that however many people may have perished during
"the first Thirty Years War," or during any other war, however ideological
and gruesome it might have been, that there is a qualitative difference be–
tween dying on a battle field and being transported to a killing field or a cre–
matorium.
EDITH KURZWEIL
THE MAKING OF AN HISTORIAN
FROM THAT TIME AND THAT
PLACE. By Lucy
Dawidowicz.
W. W. Norton Co. $2l.95.
Leon Edel has described
From That Time and That Place
as
"deeply felt and soberly narrated," ajudgement any intelligent reading of
Lucy Dawidowicz's recent book cannot but sustain. All the same, I have a
certain difficulty with the qualifier "soberly," though I cannot say it is incor–
rect or imprecise to any degree. Lucy Dawidowicz's memoir of her stay in
the ghetto city ofVilna is indeed soberly narrated; there are in it no purple
passages; her prose is sturdy, clear, and always to the point. And yet ... the
whole thing comes off like a poem; it is in a way a love song to the Jewish
inhabitants ofVilna who were destroyed in the Holocaust, reminding me, for
one, ofJehuda Halevi's poems oflove for Jerusalem. He, the greatest poet
in Hebrew between David and Bialik, celebrated the city he loved but had
not seen. Finally, he was able to journey to Palestine and see the city of his
dreams. He was slain, before its walls, by an Arab.
Lucy Dawidowicz could not have had any special feelings about Vilna
before she visited it. Her aim in going there on a stipend from YIVO in
1938, with Europe on the verge of war, was to find out for herself what it
was like to live in a Jewish community, where the great tormenting questions
