Until recently, all my bookcases had two rows of books on every shelf. Three years ago, one of those shelves collapsed, in the middle of the night, scaring the heck out of me. In daylight, I knew I had to pare down. Half the books in that bookcase (American history) had to go. It took a few weeks, but I did it. During Covid, I thought I’d better tackle the Fiction bookcase before its shelves started collapsing, and that task was done.
Last week, it was time to take on the European/world history bookcase. First, I removed all the books and piled them in categories (Europe, Russia and Russian Revolution, Middle East, Africa, etc.). Then I had to go through each category: what to keep, what to give away, which books so decrepit or so marked up I have to toss them (that’s painful).
Today I sorted through the Holocaust
section. I read “Schindler’s List” as soon as it came out, and for the first
time I was conscious that there were people who survived the Nazis’ effort to
kill every Jew they could find. All I had known up until that moment, at age
40, was that six million Jews were murdered, and if my grandparents hadn’t come
to the United States at the beginning of the century, I
would have been among
them (whoever I would have been in that case, a more metaphysical issue). Who
wanted to know any more? But survivors? This I needed to know more about. I’d
read Keneally’s book in November 1982, and over the next six months I found and
read 29 more — survivors’ accounts, histories, biographies, even fiction, and
more. Ten of those books I still have, and have since acquired even more, most
of which I’ve not read. The books to keep are mostly chosen, but there’s one
dilemma I’m facing. I have two histories — Lucy Dawidowicz’s “The War Against
The Jews 1933-1945” (a small paperback) and Martin Gilbert’s “The Holocaust: A
history of the Jews of Europe duirng the Second World War” (a large hardcover).
Maybe for now I’ll keep both and see whether there’s room for them on the
shelves.
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