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

Spitzer, Prof Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1480298115 ISBN 13: 9781480298118

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Synopsis

In the 1930s, many tens of thousands of people fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe found refuge in Latin America. And in the short, terrifying months between the Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 and the outbreak of World War II, Bolivia was one of the few remaining places

in the entire

world to accept Jewish refugees; more than twenty thousand Central Europeans were soon remaking their lives in this unknown land. Their story was largely overlooked until Leo Spitzer began his pathbreaking work for

Hotel Bolivia

; their extraordinary experiences have never been examined in such touching, memorable detail. But

Hotel Bolivia

is more than a colorful chapter in the history of the Jewish diaspora, and more than another effort to document the life stories, and reclaim the memories, of ordinary people who have been hidden from history. Leo Spitzer—whose Viennese Jewish family arrived in La Paz in 1939 and who lived in Bolivia for almost ten years—is a historian with a special interest in the interdependence of, and tension between, memory and history. With a subtle use of oral-history sources—interviews with survivors who left Bolivia and now live in Israel, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere—and unusual archival illustrations and photographs, he examines the effects of displacement on the experiences of people remaking their lives in a country so strange to them—effects on their European culture and memories, on their Jewish identities, and on Bolivia's politics and society. His beautifully written book is a personal testament to the diverse cultures that shaped him and a haunting consideration of the ways we make meaning out of the cultural baggage we carry with us wherever we go.

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: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1480298115
• ISBN 13: 9781480298118
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258