Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism - Softcover

Spitzer, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809001756 ISBN 13: 9780809001750

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1999

Synopsis

In the 1930s, thousands of people fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe found refuge in Latin America. But by late 1938, Bolivia was one of the few places in the entire world that was still accepting Jewish refugees; more than twenty thousand Central Europeans soon remade their lives there. Leo Spitzer examines, with exemplary subtlety and detail, the tension between memory and history that shows in their story: their European culture, their Jewish identities, their sense of displacement, and their experience of Bolivia's politics and society.

About this title

Review:

When, in the mid-1930s, Jews began to leave Europe in flight from Nazi persecution, they found that they were welcome only in a few countries. One of them was Bolivia, which, despite the presence of many pro-Nazi German émigrés, readily accepted 20,000 Jewish refugees. Thousands of miles away from the unfolding Holocaust, these newcomers struggled to rebuild their lives--to find work, to begin families, to make a home among strangers. And they struggled to retain the memory of their now destroyed homelands, to preserve their customs and languages in the shock of displacement. Leo Spitzer, born in La Paz to Austrian Jewish refugees, offers an ethnographic historical account of the world of the Bolivian Jews, an account made richer by his explorations of his family's past. At the heart of his study is a troubling question: should not all the Jews of Europe, well aware of Hitler's intentions, have left their homes and come to places like Bolivia? His consideration of why so many stayed to face death lends philosophical weight to what is already a valuable contribution to Holocaust studies--even if Spitzer modestly closes by suggesting that the story of the Bolivian Jews may well "shrink to a paragraph, a sentence, even to a footnote within the larger story of Nazi persecution." --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Leo spitzer was born in La Paz in 1939. Since 1969 he has taught at Dartmouth College, where he is now Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History. The author of two other books, he lives with his wife and children in Norwich, Vermont.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0809001756
• ISBN 13: 9780809001750
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256