In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama's Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

Rosengarten, Theodore

In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama's Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, by Dan J. Puckett. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. xiv + 326 pp.

Dan Puckett said he had planned to write a book that "described how Nazism, war, and the Holocaust affected African American demands for civil rights "-a book worth waiting for if it turns out to be half as edifying as the one he wrote first, this meticulously researched and carefully hewn study of Alabama Jews in the 1930s and 1940s (ix). In this micro-history of a Jewish minority's struggle for normalcy with universal implications, Puckett shows how the shadow of the madman in the title grows larger over time.

In 1930, the Jewish population of Alabama peaked at 13,000, out of a total of 2.6 million (compared to 9,000 today, out of nearly 5 million). Most Jews lived in the three main cities--Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile--and a few important commercial hubs, including Selma, Dothan, and Gadsden, though Jewish households could be found in every settlement big enough to support a store. In the cities, older families of Central European origin had drifted into Reform Judaism and made every effort to assimilate into local society. Reform congregations adhered to the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, seeing themselves as "no longer a nation but a religious community" that never expected "a return to Palestine" (75). Newer arrivals--before 1933--were more likely to come from Russia and Poland. They largely clung to Orthodoxy and to the dream of Zionism. No matter how Jews thought of themselves, however, to their fundamentalist Protestant neighbors they were simultaneously Christ-killers and the people of the book, "chosen" for a purpose yet to be realized in history.

They were also white people in a land where the problem was the Negro and not the Jew. Jews were tolerated so long as they behaved like gentiles and did not criticize the racial order. In the years just prior to World War II, Alabama Jews and non-Jews alike "failed to recognize the similarity between the persecution of Jews in Germany ... and the situation of African Americans in the Jim Crow South" (7). Was this a failure of courage on the part of people who knew better? Or did Jews genuinely accept the dictums of racial supremacy? The question hovers over the pre-war, wartime, and post-war years, as most Jews were eerily silent when it came to advocating for change.

After the Nazis began murdering Jews, the white press was only too glad to point out how the two systems diverged. We might think Hitler's brand of racial supremacy would find "a receptive audience" in Alabama, "yet it did not," says Puckett. Compared to annihilating "the other," yes, Jim Crow was moderate. But the system was plenty violent. Black lives were shorter, education was denied, the law was selectively enforced, and violence was a first resort for punishing real and imagined violations of race taboos. The black press reported on the kinship between Nazism and Jim Crow. Hitler openly connected the two, and when "White Alabama" heard the names of the defense team for the Scottsboro boys, in the infamous trial in 1931, it '"didn't see two lawyers. It saw two New York Jews'" (19)

What would happen in Alabama if Hitler got here? "In the persecution of the Jews, the Negro has been given a pattern of his estate under Hitlerism," wrote Robert Durr, in the Weekly Review (122). "Change the color of these victims to black or brown," said the Birmingham World, "and you will have an idea of what Africa or the American Black Belt would resemble under Fascist rule" (148). The Weekly Review put it more bluntly: "Hitler Out to Get Negro Scalps: Awful Fate of Jews Awaits Them" (123). Even when the war ended, the danger was not over. Pointing to "those perpetrators against human equality," the newspaper warned, "All Nazis are not dead" (129).

My favorite part of Puckett's book is the chapter devoted to "The War," with its focus on the experiences of Jewish Birmingham boys who fought in Europe and sent letters home. The author skillfully spins their stories, treating these humble communications with the respect due important evidence. With unshakable faith, Harry Boblavsky tells how he and "five other Jewish soldiers held a seder the first night of Passover in a small German village with gefilte fish that one had received in a care package from home, matzo rations, and two bottles of wine, which they had liberated from the Wehrmacht a few days before" (161). Roger N. Blum had immigrated to America from France and had not been in Birmingham two years when he was called into the army in 1941. In November 1945, six months after VE-Day, Blum returned to Brumath, France, with his parents, who had survived the war in the Vichy south. All their furniture and possessions had been stripped by a Nazi who had been quartered in their old home. Blum learned where the man lived and, armed with a pistol, he proceeded to the German village, went into the man's house, and room-by-room retrieved his parents' belongings. "All the items belong to my parents and I am confiscating them," he announced to the German with Jewish innocence and bluster (164).

Puckett observes that the Holocaust "plays a large, perhaps even a central role in how many Alabamians, and indeed many Americans remember World War II" (233). Similarly, my students in South Carolina are more likely to recognize the name Treblinka than Guadalcanal. This has become unexceptional, as the shadow lengthens. The impact of the Holocaust--not yet known by that name--on returning soldiers, Jewish and African American, is a promising area of research. The tales of suffering Mark "Bubbas" Marcus of Montgomery heard in the camps from the just-liberated prisoners, "renewed my interest in being Jewish." His response may sound counter-intuitive, but it was not rare. Marcus took a philosophic view. "If we are the 'chosen people' you'd hate to see that tremendous influence of the Jews throughout history end.... But as far as God, you wonder sometimes" (165).

Theodore Rosengarten

College of Charleston and University of South Carolina