Books About Books: Stolen Words by Mark Glickman

Besides Gregory Feifer’s The Great Gamble, another book I bought for myself last Christmas morning happened to be Rabbi Mark Glickman’s Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books. I can’t remember just how this book originally came to my attention, but once it caught my eye Stolen Words went straight to the top of my to be read list (TBR). Perhaps it was fitting that mere days after buying a copy of Stolen Words I began reading it. As I enjoyably made my way through it, it didn’t take me long to realize I’d made a valuable purchase. Stolen Words is a very good book.

As Nazi Germany overran the nations of Europe, special teams were officially tasked with plundering Jewish books from synagogues, libraries and households. While the Nazi’s might have begun their reign of terror by burning books, quickly their goal shifted to collecting such books. According to the Nazi’s twisted logic, they sought to mine the stolen books in hopes of proving to the world the Jews were an enemy race bent on the destruction of humanity. Entire state-sponsored libraries of confiscated Jewish books were planned, but put on hold until the end of the war. By the time Germany surrendered, millions of stolen books lay stashed in warehouses, and in one case an ancient castle.

With so many of the book’s original owners murdered and entire Jewish communities wiped off the face of the earth, returning them to their rightful owners would be a Sisyphean task. Not counting the countless texts grabbed by the Soviets as the Red Army surged towards Berlin, that thankless project fell to the occupying Americans. After years of effort, in the end some books found their way to America, some to libraries in Europe and some to the young State of Israel. Tragically, too many of these stolen books vanished off the face of the earth, never to be read or studied again.

As the old cliché goes, timing is everything. I lucked out by reading Adam Kirsch’s The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature prior to reading Stolen Words since this helped me gain a deeper understanding of the great texts of Judaism. In turn, Stolen Words served as a nice lead-in to Anders Rydell’s The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance. (Review forthcoming.)

Stolen Words is a great book for any bibliophile, not to mention readers interested in Judaism but also the horrors of the Second World War.