Contemporary Literary Criticism | Richler, Mordecai (Vol. 185) - Geoffrey Wheatcroft (review date 22 January 1995)

Geoffrey Wheatcroft (review date 22 January 1995)

SOURCE: Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. “Lingering Questions.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (22 January 1995): 4, 7.

[In the following review, Wheatcroft compares This Year in Jerusalem with Glenn Frankel's Beyond the Promised Land, calling them both “complementary and absorbing” books.]

Just 100 years ago, in late 1894, a French army officer of Jewish extraction was arrested, tried and falsely convicted of treason. The trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and his formal degradation on a barracks square in front of a mob that shouted “Death to the Jews!” was witnessed by the Paris correspondent of a Vienna newspaper. Months later, Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his clarion call for resolving the apparently irresolvable “Jewish problem”: the misery of the poor Jews living in Eastern Europe under the czar, but also the false and humiliating—and, as the...

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