Communication

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REVIEWS

To the Editors:
I would like to respond to Professor Lynn Rapaport's review of my book A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (AHR, October 2005, 1278–1279). While Rapaport finds the story of the Kalmans "fascinating," she sees nothing good about the book itself. The research, she writes, is sloppy; the writing and translation are clumsy; it is neither scholarly nor a portrait of a "typical Jewish family" in postwar Germany. Important voices, she finds, are missing, and the book is lopsided, with half of it given to one of the four siblings, the other half to the rest.
To start with the point about alleged lopsidedness: As stated throughout, the focus of my book is on the ten children born to the four siblings who survived the Holocaust. The eldest brother had five of the children; the other three siblings had the other five. Logically, the first half of the book went to the eldest brother's five children, the second half to the five children of the other three siblings. Moreover, one of the eldest brother's five children, as a company executive, was the primary informant about the family firm. Should I have condensed the life histories of the first five children so that collectively they were allotted less space than the rest? Professor Rapaport, as a sociologist herself, should recognize that this does not make sense. As it turned out, each nuclear family group is given roughly the same amount of space per child. Important voices in the family are indeed missing. But most of the time, there is not much to be gleaned from interviews with very old persons, and as for the deceased, I have not yet found a way of interviewing them via séances. The fact, moreover, that some individuals have more to say than others is only natural, and I see no reason why I should have cut their stories short.
Rapaport dismisses the book because it is not a portrait of a "typical Jewish family" in postwar Germany. But nowhere in the book did I make any such claim. To the contrary, I pointed out that the family is of Polish origin, whereas the overwhelming majority of Jews in Germany today have come from Russia. Instead, I have discussed epistemological issues relating to the problems of representativeness and case study in order to explicate the value of such a portrait. As far as the sloppy research and clumsy writing and translation are concerned, as long as the reviewer does not supply us with more than incidental evidence, I cannot take this seriously, and it remains pure invective. For the occasional error, I take full responsibility.
I should like to stress that I welcome critical reviews of my work. Indeed, some years back, I reviewed Professor Rapaport's own book on German Jewry quite critically. But I believe I did provide solid evidence to back up my critique.
Y. Michal Bodemann University of Toronto

Lynn Rapaport responds:
In my review, I describe the unevenness in the quality of Bodemann's interviews, the voices that are missing, and how this impacts the Kalmans' portrait. In his response, Bodemann admits that important voices are missing, but explains that "there is not much to be gleaned from interviews with old persons," and that he has not found a way to interview the deceased via "séances"! Bodemann misses the point. Serious scholarship involves carefully designing a study to collect appropriate data to answer research questions. Instead, Bodemann's book reads as if he slapped together whatever raw data he managed to collect.
Bodemann takes issue with my comment that his book does not represent "typical Jewish" families in postwar Germany, saying that the Kalmans are not Russian—a reference to the migration in the past decade of thousands of Russian Jews to Germany. Again, Bodemann misses the point. My remark has nothing to do with the recent Russian Jewish immigration, which I do not even mention in my review. I am merely stating my objection to how Bodemann frames and describes his story of the Kalmans within the context of Jews who, for a variety of reasons, made a home for themselves in Germany right after World War II, and how characteristics of the Kalman family make them atypical within this group. Although Bodemann denies in his response that he considers the Kalmans "typical," he does indeed often claim exactly that. Two quick examples: "The Kalmans' story is quite typical for those who arrived in Germany from the concentration camps or from hiding in the forests in Poland and the Ukraine" (3; my italics). The younger Kalmans are "quite typical of the average Jewish community membership in Germany today" (13; my italics).
Bodemann argues in his letter that he does not make generalizations from a sample of one family. Yet in his book he makes such generalizations. For instance, he writes that these interviews provide "an entire range of observations and conclusions that can be made about Jewish life in Germany, its orientations between religion and Zionism, family dynamics in general, the role and transmission of family memories, diasporic Jewish life today under conditions of 'globalization,' and numerous others" (25).
Finally, Bodemann gratuitously brings up his long-forgotten review of my own work, Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations (Cambridge University Press, 1997). He should be informed that my book won the 1998 Best Book Award in the Sociology of Religion from the American Sociological Association.
Lynn Rapaport Pomona College

To the Editors:
I wish to respond to the review by Robert O. Kirkland of my book Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman Years (AHR, December 2005, 1555–1556). Kirkland's McCarthyist attack on Acción Democrática (AD) in Venezuela—his bizarre charge that AD had an "alliance with the Communist Party"—should not be allowed to obscure the central thesis of my book. In fact, as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) observed at the time, AD was "not only non-Communist but anti-Communist" (157). Support for reformist and democratic movements such as AD was part of American policy during the early Cold War years. This policy had significant successes in Cuba, Brazil, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, for example, the American ambassador sought a negotiated solution to the 1948 civil war that would preserve constitutional institutions while weakening the power of the communist "shock brigades" allied to the government (173). Meanwhile, the CIA may have covertly supplied arms to the pro-democratic rebels (176). The consequence of American policy was a contribution to the restoration of political democracy in Costa Rica. Unfortunately, not all of the successes of the early Truman years continued into the later Truman years. The failure of American policy in Venezuela, Peru, and Cuba was not the result of the Cold War, but rather of largely autonomous political developments in these countries and an American commitment to avoid intervention in their internal affairs as long as American security was not directly threatened. I argued not that anticommunist and economic concerns were unimportant, but rather that such concerns formed part of an overall policy shaped by competing conceptions of the common good. In particular, I stressed the tension between a policy informed by democratic solidarity and one informed by respect for the national sovereignty of others. The civility of Yankee imperialism was a combination of both of these policies with the changing political realities of Latin America.
Steven Schwartzberg

Robert O. Kirkland responds:
I wish to thank Steven Schwartzberg for his letter. The author is clearly passionate regarding his central thesis on the "civility of Yankee imperialism." The main thrust of his argument is that what drove U.S. policy during this era was its concern for the common good of democracy over the quest for economic and geopolitical advantage.
As I mention in my review, I do believe that Schwartzberg makes a contribution to the field. In other instances I was simply not persuaded by his argument or found it unconvincing. In the case of Venezuela, Schwartzberg is correct in stating that Acción Democrática (AD) did not have a formal alliance with the Communist party. However, there were many concerns within the U.S. and Venezuelan business community that AD would fall prey to Communism and were working on a formal alliance. These concerns were certainly voiced to the embassy in the years preceding the coup and were influential in eroding U.S. support for AD. The principal U.S. diplomatic objective then, as it is today, was to keep the oil flowing. My point is that the U.S. drive for geopolitical and economic advantage and its heightened sensitivity to Communism were the primary causes for the failure to act to forestall the overthrow of AD—not its concern for respecting sovereignty.
Schwartzberg labels scholars who hold these views as "cynics" of U.S. policy in the region. In this regard, I stand guilty as charged.
Robert O. Kirkland Claremont McKenna College

ERRATA

On p. 68 of the February 2006 issue, in note 59 of the article "Local Religion and the Imperial Imaginary" by Thomas David DuBois, the name Tsuji Masanobu should be Tsujimura Shinobu. The author regrets the error.

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