May 16, 2022
Journalist Kinstler debuts with a captivating investigation into “how the memory of the Holocaust extends into the present and acts upon it.” After the Nazis invaded Latvia in 1941, Kinstler’s paternal grandfather, Boris Kinstler, joined the Arajs Kommando, a Latvian police unit tasked with ridding the region of communists and Jews. In 1949, Boris disappeared from Latvia and was reported dead by Soviet authorities, fueling rumors that he’d been a KGB agent “charged with killing Latvian partisans.” Interwoven with Boris’s story is that of Herberts Cukurs, a famed Latvian aviator who also joined the Arajs Kommandos and was accused by eyewitnesses of participating in the Rumbula massacre. After escaping Allied authorities and settling in Brazil, Cukurs was assassinated by Mossad agents in 1965. Forty years later, the Latvian government opened an investigation into Cukurs that concluded there was “no evidence” he had taken part in “acts that qualify as genocide.” Though the links between Boris and Cukurs—which were first suggested to the author by a “cheap” Latvian spy novel that claims her grandfather was responsible for Cukurs’s fate—feel somewhat tenuous, Kinstler lucidly analyses the legal, cultural, and political matters involved. The result is a fascinating and often troubling account of how the past haunts the present.
Starred review from June 15, 2022
A masterful synthesis of family history and Holocaust investigation that blurs lines among perpetrators, justice, and national identity. Kinstler, the former managing editor of the New Republic, captures a worrisome historical reality in our current moment of creeping authoritarianism. "Survivors have been telling the story of the Holocaust for the better part of a century," she writes, "and still the judges ask for proof." Her grim landscape is the "Holocaust by bullets" in the Baltic states following the Soviet Union's brutal annexation. When the Nazis invaded, local auxiliaries in Latvia, the Arajs Kommando, outdid the Germans in cruelty, murdering Jews without remorse. Aviator Herberts Cukurs, one key member, ducked culpability after the war, but he was assassinated by Mossad in 1965 in Uruguay. (For more on Cukurs, see Stephan Talty's The Good Assassin.) Kinstler was drawn to the story via a haunting connection: Her long-vanished grandfather, Boris, was also in the Kommando, but he may have been a double agent for the Russians (he "officially" committed suicide following the war). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the release of reams of Holocaust documentation, including perpetrator and survivor testimonies, Latvian nationalists and revisionists sought to rehabilitate Cukurs in strange ways, including an operatic stage musical that "sought to absolve both him and his nation from any allegations of complicity." This also led to renewed investigations into both his murder and his activities inside the Riga ghetto and subsequent massacres of Jews, all of which fueled Kinstler's determined investigation. "I remained bewildered that, so many decades after the Second World War, questions of complicity, culpability, rehabilitation and restitution were still making their way through the courts," she writes. The author writes with literary flair and ambition, highlighting the important stories of surviving principals and delving into such relevant topics as jurisprudence, post-Cold War Eastern Europe, and cultural efforts to come to terms with, or rationalize, still-obscured aspects of the Holocaust. A vital addition to the finite canon of Holocaust studies rooted in personal connection.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
August 1, 2022
This book by Politico contributor Kinstler starts with a scene from a World War II spy thriller that features the author's grandfather, who had disappeared decades ago. She spends the book investigating how true that scene really was, tracing him in historical accounts and photographs, and trying to find out who he really was. Her probing leads to uncovering his connections to war crimes, the KGB, and the infamous "Butcher of Riga" Herberts Cukurs and his posthumous prosecution. She shows how firsthand accounts of the Holocaust are recorded, remembered, muddled with age, and difficult to use in criminal proceedings. She also examines how nations and communities reckon with the Holocaust, how the survivors' stories are honored or distorted, and how some family secrets or mysteries are well-known to others. At times, there is an abundance of information, narratives get confusing as they skip around timelines and countries, and readers will occasionally forget who's at the center of the book, but Kinstler enthralls audiences as clues are revealed. VERDICT For those who were enthralled by Deborah Lipstadt's Denial or Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men.--Amanda Ray
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.