How to accept German reparations /

Slyomovics (UCLA), an anthropologist of the Middle East and North Africa and the daughter and granddaughter of Czechoslovakian Jewish concentration camp survivors, makes an original contribution to the burgeoning theoretical and practical literature on reparations. She ranges widely and draws on her family members' conflicted responses to applying for and then receiving post-WW II German reparations compensation. "Documenting their reparations," Slyomovics explains, "became my way to make their respective pasts unfold." She uses her family's history with German reparations to illustrate elements of suffering and loss experienced by compensable victims worldwide and to provide comparisons for modern redress suits, including Algerian Jews residing in France and others seeking restitution for human rights violations under colonialism generally and settler colonialism in the Middle East. Slyomovics also connects reparations to such broad questions as compensation or indemnity, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition. Her powerful, suggestive work underscores many of the complex legal, ethnographic, and personal dilemmas that lay at the heart of attaining historical justice through reparations, which Slyomovics concludes is "an incomplete and unstable process ... part of a dynamic mechanism in which money is not the sole determinant." For all college and university collections. --John David Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte