The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945 (review)

Abstract

The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945, by Steven B. Bowman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 325 pp. $55.00. Steven Bowman, long regarded as doyen of the emerging (sub) field of Greek Jewish history, has, with his Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945, produced a careful and multilayered examination of Greek Jewry's most devastating five years, 1940-1945 - the Nazi occupation of Greece and the Holocaust. And the book's focus really is on those five years: while at various points it makes reference to events outside its frame, the book's core chapters zero in on the tangled and multiple threads in the Greek Jewish story of the war years. The result is that Bowman's book is unquestionably the best we have for understanding - through his careful primary research - this most densely packed and horrific period in Greek Jewish history. Of necessary consequence, then, those who do not already have some familiarity with Greek Jewish history may find the book difficult to access, and those looking for a broader frame will have to look elsewhere (Bernard Pierrohs Juifs et Chretiens de la Grece Moderne, for instance, for those who read French, is a superb place to start). In a compact introductory chapter, Bowman manages somewhat remarkably to sketch with broad strokes the origins and history of various Jewish groups in Greece, outline the contents of the book as a whole, give a summary narrative literature review, and consider the merits of different types of source materials (and, particularly, the difficulties of working with memoirs). This approach - that of bringing together rapid-fire, multiple questions and trajectories - is characteristic of the work as a whole. Indeed, Bowman's book is a strange but ultimately satisfying combination of narrative styles, historical questions, and thematic threads. At points it borders on cataloguing - intentionally so: Chapter Five, for instance, entitled Chronicle of the Deportations (presumably in a deliberate nod to Danuta Czech's famous Auschwitz Chronicle) gives a painstaking listing of the stages of deportation, the number of transports from various locations around Greece, the numbers in each transport, and the numbers murdered upon arrival. Such detail is historically important, but it does not make for easy or fluid reading. Yet it at other points Bowman waxes virtually poetic, with heartbreaking rhetoric interspersed throughout: does one survive in an environment whose raison d'etre is death? How does an individual fulfill the commandment to live when all around are strangers organized to kill? …