dr fishman you're right narrative history is very different from academic prose and even though i'm very experienced with the latter i think this is a particularly good example of the former - to the point where i 100% thought this was a mass market book for a lay audience until about five seconds ago. if the dialogue and thoughts recorded in this book are all sourced from archival materials, ghetto diaries, and interviews, then this truly is a tour de force.

will say, though, that it's always weird to read a book that prominently features 20th century jewishness and judaism in 2024 solely due to the (both historical and contemporaneous) conflations of zionism and jewishness. i'm not the best person to speak on any of this but Huh.

It probably says more about me than about this book that I didn’t care so much to read about how they smuggled the documents out of Vilna as what was in them. I was intrigued by the glimpses I got into the young Theodor Herzl and into the panegyrics of the Vilna Gaon against the Hasidim. (What a nasty, brilliant man!) I skimmed through the book David Fishman actually wrote. I can completely understand it would be thrilling to another reader.

A (deeply researched) story of courage and fortitude in hellish circumstances. This book needed to be written.

Now that I have assigned it five stars and written an enthusiastic first paragraph, allow me to offer a few critiques.

1
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Insufficient context given.
- American readers do not understand the enmity among different types of socialists and communists, so they don't get why certain Vilners resented each other.
- Americans younger than I probably don't understand the blind anti-communism that prevented Schmerke from becoming an American citizen.
- And I don't understand why an American Jew advised against giving a particular artifact to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, advising that it would not be given the care it should receive.

2
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Insufficient copy editing. A few examples of errors that should have been corrected:

- Amateurish writing: "Off from the sports field".

- Silly error: "An arm grabbed at Plonsky's clothes". Um, I think it was a hand.

- Bad word choice: "caste clay" for "cast clay", "hoards" for "hordes".

- Grammatical error: "It's" for "Its".

This is a story about the Holocaust that was new to me and I think unknown by many. Men and women that risked their lives to save Jewish historical and religious documents and books from the looting and destruction led by the Nazis. This book had to grow on me, because there are portions of the stories that are repeated and every time it happened I was taken out of the story. But I was captured as soon as I read...

Why did these men and women risk their lives for the sake of books and papers? Basically, they were making an existential statement and performing an act of faith. The existential statement was that literature and culture were ultimate values, which were greater than the life of any individual or group.

I connected to this incredibly tragic statement and I was all in for this incredible Holocaust story. The men and women that fought back in ways that spoke to their heart through hate and torture that I cannot fathom.

My heart broke more than once while reading what members of the paper brigade lived through. But my breath was taken away reading a letter Abraham Sutzkever wrote to Rachela Krinsky about living after their liberation.

"Rachela. I can feel (I used to think that I couldn't feel anything) how your heart is contorted with pain. But I don't believe that life deserves to be taken so seriously.... We must accept reality as it is. We must learn to discover the chemical formula for transforming sorrow into joy. Otherwise, it is impossible to live.... I reject resignation."

This story made an impact on my mind and heart. I'm grateful to the friend that gifted me the book and I want to thank all of the people that fought back any way they could during the Holocaust to allow for a future of Judiasm and Jewish culture and ideas.

Amazing the drive they all had and the knowing that the books and writings were needed for years to come. I have to admit I thought the flow of the book was not my favorite, it didn't flow well for me. Adding the photos was powerful for me, I could not only read about them but seeing their faces really made it sink in.

The Book Smugglers was recommended to me by someone who works at the Jewish museum in Vilnius. I got it on a terrible ebook, expecting just to read a few relevant chapters for my BA thesis. Very quickly I decided that I would read the whole thing.

This book is both meticulously researched and written in a very readable style. The narrative is fast paced, exciting and emotional. I didn't release which I started how attached I was going to get to these real historical figures as if they were characters in a novel. At several points I was overcome by the poignancy not just of the acts of cultural resistance and preservation described, but also small human actions - details which could well have been left out of many books, but Fishman thought important to include.

This is not a book that I will forget any time soon.

Years ago, I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which the author argues that there must be something for people to live for in order to survive adversity. That thing might be family, creating art, or even revenge. For the Jewish librarians, writers, and teachers in David E. Fishman’s The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, the thing that keeps them going in the face of the Holocaust is saving as much of their written heritage as possible from destruction and theft by the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss for review consideration.