A Familys Quest from the Minsk Ghetto to Netanyahus Israel
Starred review from August 1, 2024
This book, published in French four years ago, still feels fresh and relevant, which says a lot about the long-standing, intractable nature of the conflict in the Middle East. Now published for the first time in English, this edition also contains a new introduction and minor revisions. Here, Jewish Le Monde correspondent Smolar describes a rhetorical conversation with his grandfather, a dedicated communist who survived the Minsk Ghetto and the Holocaust, and with his father, who was forced to leave Poland in 1968. In trying to understand the personal convictions of these two forebears, Smolar reckons with his own connection to Judaism and the forces that have shaped the modern state of Israel. Contrasted with the conversations of the past are contemporary interviews and exchanges with contacts across Israel and Gaza, which give a much deeper context of views that may be difficult to understand from a distance. With no easy answers, the book evokes a refreshing moral clarity. VERDICT A poignant, engaging, important, and personal perspective of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, in which Smolar cleverly combines political and historical aspects with elements of memoir.--Margaret Heller
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 15, 2024
A French Jewish journalist examines his uneasy relationship with Netanyahu-era Israel. "Judaism and Zionism are no longer aligned. I don't mean Zionism in the sense of a legitimate right to statehood, but its disfigurement by the aggressive agenda of Israel's political Right." So writes Smolar, a Middle East correspondent forLe Monde. As his subtitle suggests, Smolar's family arrived in Paris following pogroms in Russia, but that did not diminish what he calls his family's alternate religions: his grandfather's communism, his father's devotion to once-democratic Poland, his own commitment to journalism. His title is ironic, but not so far off the mark in the eyes of the conservative forces that have taken hold in Israel. The overarching mood there after Oct. 7, 2023, has been to destroy Hamas, which, Smolar argues, does nothing whatever to solve the problem of what to do with the Palestinian people once the smoke clears--if it ever clears, for current conditions in Gaza, he warns, "will combine to produce a new generation of Palestinians driven by hatred of Jews." Smolar notes that mounting antisemitism in Europe and the U.S. complicate the possibilities of peace by contributing to Israel's us-against-them siege mentality. He combines big-picture views with small, revealing scenes, as when he visits a once-illegal Jewish settlement on the West Bank, founded by religious extremists, that the Netanyahu government is now pressing to annex: "A project that was frankly marginal, eccentric, and inaudible ten or twenty years ago has been polished and normalized." Against this, Smolar portrays peace activists, ethicists, and anti-Netanyahu activists who urge that Israel remember its leftist roots and truly live up to its self-proclaimed status as "the only democracy in the Middle East." Solid on-the-ground reporting combines with memoir to offer a revealing look at life in a deeply conflicted Israel.
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