Hotel Bolivia : the culture of memory in a refuge from Nazism /

In this fascinating book, the author serves as both historian of and participant in Jewish emigration and exile. Born in Bolivia to an Austrian Jewish family ten days after Hitler's invasion of Poland, Spitzer (history, Yale) successfully taps into personal and familial memory as well as the collective memory of Central European Jewish immigrants who found safety from war and Nazi concentration camps in a distant and culturally alien Andean country. The author's dual role is central to an understanding of the continuity between individual and collective identity and the culturally amalgamated experience of "refugeehood." In the words of one refugee, Bolivia was for many "like a hotel. We arrived there, found a safe place to stay for a while, and then many of us packed up again and left," with a feeling of gratitude and attachment to a temporary home and experience of cultural-social amalgamation: a little Vienna recreated amidst the Indian "otherness" of Bolivia. This tale is supported by painstaking research of archives, newspapers, diaries, and oral histories collected in Bolivia and from the Jewish diaspora. One chapter explores the irony that Bolivia, perceived as a shelter for Nazi war criminals, played such a vital and largely unrecognized role as haven for many Jewish and non-Jewish refugees. A rich source and compelling read; highly recommended at all levels. W. Q. Morales; University of Central Florida

The author, a history professor at Dartmouth College, was born in La Paz, Bolivia, 10 days after the German invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. Spitzer's Austrian Jewish parents had fled the growing Nazi menace a few months before his birth. Bolivia had become a principal recipient of Jewish refugees by the end of the decade when other Latin American countries refused to accept them. For preparing this remembrance, Spitzer has utilized documentary materials from archives, repositories, and libraries, written memoirs, letters, photographs, and family albums, as well as 150 hours of videotaped interviews with surviving refugees now widely dispersed throughout the world. His dual role of historian and participant is evident in this absorbing book that examines a little-known chapter in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. The finished book will include 60 black-and-white illustration. --George Cohen

Bolivia, a haven to Nazi war criminals including Klaus Barbie, the infamous Gestapo chief of Lyon, France, was also an asylum for tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Central and Eastern Europe. Dartmouth history professor Spitzer, born in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1939Äthe son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants who had arrived just three months before his birthÄhas produced a searing account of the Jewish refugees' checkered experience in "Hotel Bolivia," as they called this mountainous country, which many of them regarded as only a temporary haven. Part memoir, part oral history, Spitzer's eye-opening study uses interviews with surviving refugees (now widely dispersed around the world), plus letters, photographs, family albums and archival documents to explore the trauma of displacement. He acutely describes these refugees' lives in terms of a dynamic of grief, nostalgia, adjustment and mourning for a shattered past, even as they kept up an identification with Austro-German Jewish bourgeois society. Spitzer, who moved to the U.S. with his family in 1950, notes ruefully that Bolivia's welcoming policy toward Jews was short-lived, as anti-Semitic agitation culminated in a right-wing military coup in 1943. Today, just 1500 Jews live in Bolivia. Illustrations not seen by PW. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Spitzer (history, Dartmouth Coll.) writes of the Jews who fled to Bolivia during the 1930s as seen from his own family history. In 1938, between the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, Bolivia was one of the few places that would accept Jewish refugees. Spitzer's own Viennese Jewish family arrived in La Paz in 1939. After detailing the process of leaving Europe and sailing across the ocean, Spitzer describes how refugees had to blend learning to live in a new land with building a new life while at the same time keeping their Jewish identity. He also explores the interrelation between history and memory and how our own culture affects society and individuals. Latin American Jewish refugees have not been written about much, making this blend of historic fact and personal experience especially noteworthy. Recommended for academic libraries. (Illustrations not seen.)ÄMary F. Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., Wheeling (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An evocative, thoughtful, and otherwise impressive combination of memoir, oral history, and reflection on the nature of memory by a child of Viennese Jews who immigrated in 1939 to the exotic, landlocked South American country. Spitzer (History/Dartmouth) was born in La Paz in the year his parents arrived, making him in a sense both a participant in and an observer of the central European Jewish refugee experience. In preparation for this book, he engaged in 150 hours of interviews with Austrian and German immigrants to Bolivia. His work is in large part a collective history, enlivened with a series of portraits of individual refugees. Spitzer is particularly interesting on the encounters marked by mutual fascination, estrangement, and stereotyping between previously upper-middle-class central European Jews and Bolivia's chacos (urban, sometimes illiterate mestizos). Beyond this, he engages in a series of reflections on ``the contextualization of memory and the interdependence--and tension--between memory and history.'' For example, after looking at his own wartime family photographs and listening to immigrants' recollections of life in Bolivia, he observes that ``groups recall, recognize, and distort their present memory to represent the past,'' quoting Joan W. SmithŽs observation that one historian's or layperson's rendering of a group's ``collective'' experience ``is at once already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted.'' Spitzer's prose occasionally bogs down, particularly in a far too detailed chapter on ``Buena Tierra,'' an ultimately failed attempt to establish a refugee rural collective. Nonetheless, his work does serve to vividly introduce readers to a little-known aspect of refugee history during the Holocaust, while impelling them to think deeply about the nature of personal adaptation, and of individual and group efforts to capture, preserve, and transmit a knowledge of what they have endured. (60 b&w photos, not seen)