Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosua, Allen Wells (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), xxxi + 447 pp., hardcover $99.95, pbk. $27.95

Abstract

Allen Wells's book recounts the relocation of European Jews to the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust. In the 1940s US and Dominican authorities facilitated the settlement of about eight hundred Jewish refugees in Sosúa, on the northern coast of the country. What makes Wells's study original is its placement of the story within the contexts of American Jewish response to the Final Solution, US policy toward Latin America, and Dominican politics. A Latin-Americanist at Bowdoin and the son of a settler himself, Wells not only read documents in US and Dominican archives, but also interviewed several of the colonists. In the first part, Wells analyzes the circumstances preceding relocation. As the Nazis radicalized their antisemitic measures, the number of German and Austrian Jews seeking to emigrate shot upward. The resultant international crisis ultimately moved Western governments to restrict immigration, both on the eve and in the wake of the Evian Conference of 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt's ill-fated attempt to inspire an international solution to the problem. But if Evian was an overall failure, the Dominican Republic, then in the first decade of the tyrannical rule of Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), did indicate interest in accepting refugees.