The Secret Alliance
The Extraordinary Story of
the Rescue of the Jews Since World War II
by Tad Szulc These are the stories of the illegal emigration and immigration of Jews to the Holy Land, from 1939 and the White Paper (the British limit on Jewish immigration to Israel) until the exodous of Soviet Jewry. Soviet Jewry is not really discussed because this book was printed in 1991. Part 1 is the story of how Jews were smuggled and bought out of Europe as the Nazis were moving in. Did you known that Eichman tried to give Jews away for money? Or that he was, before the war, cooperating with the mossad to get Jews to Palestine? Or that King Boris of Bulgaria got all the Jews of Sofia(capital of Bulgaria) into hiding in the mountains, and that the Bulgarians thought that his subsequent mysterious death was his divine punishment for helping Jews?
Part 2 is the saga of the Jewish survivors of World War II, and the holocaust, and how they tried to get into Israel shortly before, during, and immediately after the war of independance. Included as a part of this saga are the communist governments new regimes and attitudes towards Jews.
Part 3, The Middle East and North Africa, is about Jews who were not from Europe, whose lives and communities were threatened by hightened anti-semitism after Israeli independance. This is mostly how the black Jews and the Jews of Morroco managed to flee their countries, but also the stories of Iraqi, Egyptian, and other Jews in the region. In Iraq, the Kurds helped to smuggle out the majority of Iraq's ancient Jewish community, in exchange for the aid that the Israeli army gave them, including military training and a hospital.
Although the material in this book is interesting, the writing style is less than captivating. The perspective of the Jews being rescued is given only once, and could have made the book much richer. The viewpoint taken really lauds American Jewry. It also comes from a very secular viewpoint, and does not sympathise with the religous Jews shown, and even shows their adherence to their principles as being foolish and weak. There is a nice map on pages four and five, which is helpful. There is an index and a bibliography, but endnotes and/or footnotes would have been nice, because in reading, I wondered who gave Szulc which perspective (for example, was the person describing a certain operative as being someone who really stood out for being handsome his wife?).
Educational reading.
