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| #1 - Posted 14 February 2010, 1:02 AM | |
Location: United States, NYC Join date: October 2009 Member #: 3761 Posts: 12105  | Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa Allen Wells Reviewed by Richard Feinberg November/December 2009 TITLE Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa AUTHOR Allen Wells PUBLISHER Duke University Press YEAR 2009 PAGES 480 pp. ISBN 9780822344070 Wells, the son of a Sosúa settler and a historian at Bowdoin College, captures with admirable clarity the historical ironies and personal dramas at this intersection of European tragedy, U.S. diplomacy, and Caribbean caudillos Some 700 Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe made it to the resettlement colony of Sosúa, on the northern beaches of the Dominican Republic. After searching the globe for vacant spaces for desperate Jews, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt pressured Latin American governments to admit more immigrants. Sensing an opportunity to curry favor with Washington and to balance the influx of black Haitians with white Europeans, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo offered to accept up to 100,000 central European refugees. Only a small fraction made it, in part because anti-Semites in the U.S. State Department blocked transit visas, but those who did established a successful dairy cooperative (with subsidies from American Jewish philanthropists). Today, the remains of the Sosúa settlement are a tourist destination in a much more modernized Dominican Republic. Wells, the son of a Sosúa settler and a historian at Bowdoin College, captures with admirable clarity the historical ironies and personal dramas at this intersection of Europeantragedy, U.S. diplomacy, and Caribbean caudillos. "If you want to sleep well at night, it's best to avoid watching the making of sausages or politics." Otto Von Bismarck |
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