Chaim Amalek emails:
The book is an odd thing, in that it assumes a lot of background knowledge on the part of the reader. It also meanders, and the device of framing the history of 20th Century Jewry – mainly from the Pale of Settlement – in terms of the daughters of a fictional character is a bit odd. But it is still an interesting book for documenting the predominance of Jews in the economic and cultural lives of Europe during the first half of the 20th century, which leads to this question: Is this book good for the Jews? Won’t it provide antisemites with proof that Jews were the driving, necessary force without which the Bolshevik yoke would never have been fastened to the backs of Christian Europeans? Doesn’t it read like a mirror-image of Hitlers’s books, with assertions that Hitler routinely made about the putative power of the Jews how presented as documented fact by a Jew in admittedly less hostile terms?
