haymarket books, you rock!

Finally available in English. Haymarket Books win!

In the introduction to her fantastic book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Israeli reporter Amira Hass writes about her mother, Hanna Levy-Hass, who grew up in multi-ethnic Sarajevo before WWII. "Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together, studied in the same classrooms, went together to university, together became atheists and joined the Communist underground," was her mother's approving description of her youth.

Being both a Jew and a Communist put the young Hanna Levy squarely in the crosshairs of the Nazis, and during the Holocaust she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, the same concentration camp in which Anne Frank and most of her family perished.

Hearing Amira Hass's parents' story was, I think, the first time I genuinely understood the appeal that moving to Israel might have held for people who did not consciously identify themselves as Zionists. The idea of returning to their homes in Europe, to "the familiar streets that would forever scream the murder of family and friends and neighbors," to the places where so many people had wanted to kill them and so many others had passively stood by out of indifference or fear, was just too much to bear.

Hanna Levy-Hass has written a book about her experiences in Bergen-Belsen, and, in a sea of Holocaust documentation, it stands out as one of the few written by an active member of the anti-Nazi resistance (not surprisingly, a group with a very low survival rate.)

This book has been on my radar for some time, but until recently it has not been available in English. Imagine how excited I was to discover that the English translation, with a new introduction by Amira Hass, is being published by Haymarket Books!

I was around for the founding of Haymarket Books, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change, which started in 2000 with a handful of titles. After a few years away from politics, it is with pure delight that I see the Haymarket library has expanded to nearly 80 titles, from Marxist classics (some long out of print) and original works by some of today's leading revolutionaries, to the work of such "mainstream" lefties as Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Dahr Jamail and Arundhati Roy.

One of Haymarket's reprints is Chris Harman's The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918-1923, an indispensible guide to probably one of the most decisive and least understood periods of modern history--without a proper understanding of which one cannot hope to understand the Holocaust. I personally hope they are working on a reprint of The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class by Donny Gluckstein, which completely shatters the distorted undestanding of the rise of European fascism that most of us get in school, and which appears, criminally, to be out of print.

You can hear a great interview by Amy Goodman with Amira Hass about her mother and the book here.