Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War

Would a new, liberal, and ecumenical Europe emerge from the bloody horrors of World War I and the dismantling of long-entrenched autocracies? The answer, according to Howard Sachar's authoritative Dreamland, is a resounding "No." Sachar describes what we now know was the rapid collapse of post-war idealism by tracing the social and political fortunes of the continent's most fragile, resilient, and high-profile minority: the Jews. Though the bedrock of the book is a wide-ranging analysis of the highly complex European stew of nationalism, xenophobia, re-invention and revolutionary movements, Sachar manages to turn it into a narrative of sorts by focusing on the lives of a half-dozen or so "canaries in the mine": Sigmund Freud; Marcel Proust, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Kafka, and Hungary's Bela Kun among them. Dreamland is a formidable work of erudition and scholarship; illuminating but extremely detailed and demanding. --H. O'Billovitch