The politics of memory

Even after thirty-five years, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews remains the most comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. Yet at the time it was written, as Mr. Hilberg relates in The Politics of Memory, both the manuscript and its subject matter were refused by major publishers and university presses.

When at last his monumental study was published, to extraordinary acclaim, the author found himself facing a hostile reception from those who refused to believe that the Jews had been less than heroic in their journey to the gas chambers. For Mr. Hilberg not only documented unsparingly the process that destroyed the Jews; he also showed how the Jews had sometimes collaborated in their own destruction.

How his work was used and abused - especially by Hannah Arendt, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Nora Levin - draws Mr. Hilberg's attention and comprises one of the most censorious passages of his book.

The Politics of Memory begins in Vienna, where Mr. Hilberg spent his early years before fleeing with his family in 1939. It continues in New York City and later in Burlington, Vermont, where he spent most of his academic life. This poignant memoir brings full circle a scholarly undertaking that in many ways has been a terrible calling.