SOURCE: Linklater, Andro. “Poles Together—And Apart.” Spectator 280, no. 8845 (14 February 1998): 32.

In the following review, Linklater examines the central argument in Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, praising Hoffman's “provocative thesis.”

Laziness can kill. When a peasant in the market-place of Bransk, a small town in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border, tells Eva Hoffman how he helped dispose of Jews who had been murdered by the Nazis, carrying so many corpses in his cart to a mass grave that he had to wash the blood off in the river, the story triggers a chain of associations. Poland after all was where anti-Semitism became most deadly, where the word pogrom was invented, where a population of about three million Jews in 1939 was reduced to around 300,000 by 1945, and, since the war, to less than 10,000. Evidently, the peasant must be part of...