Arts+ Selects

AMONG THE RIGHTEOUS
Robert Satloff

Robert Satloff reports in his important new book on the Holocaust's reach into Arab lands. Holocaust "minimization," if not outright denial, is pervasive and officially blessed in Arab press, scholarship, and political discourse. State-run newspapers in Egypt, which has made peace with Israel, repeatedly undermine the reality of the Holocaust by challenging the number of Jews who died in Hitler's genocidal campaign and by equating "Nazism" with "Zionism." Mr. Satloff, a historian and expert on modern Arab affairs, who heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says he wrote "Among the Righteous" to answer a narrow question: "Did any Arabs save any Jews during the Holocaust?" Was there, he asks, a Muslim Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by, among other ruses, providing them with Swedish passports? Or an Arab Oskar Schindler? Mr. Satloff concludes that the record of Middle Eastern Arabs towards the Jews is not unlike that of Europeans.

Judith Miller

MATTERS OF HONOR
Louis Begley

Louis Begley is one of the best American novelists, but no one would accuse him of being the most lovable. His books do not engage the reader with that puppyish, garrulous, finally evasive sincerity which, since the eclipse of postmodernism and minimalism, has been the favorite mode of younger fiction writers. Rather, Mr. Begley leads his reader in a minuet of ironies, a delicate dialectic of concealment and revelation. His narrators, who are always his surrogates, tend to be remote, slightly sinister figures, estranged from the reader by the very power and sophistication they so jealously guard. "Matters of Honor," Mr. Begley's terrifically intelligent, moving, and entertaining new novel, is not just his best book since "Wartime Lies." It is also the book that brings his entire achievement as a novelist into focus. That is because it deals, in typically indirect fashion, with Mr. Begley's own passage from child to adult, European to American, powerlessness to power, poverty to wealth. It shows how a man very like Mr. Begley pursues and claims the prizes that we find on Mr. Begley's own CV. (Long before he became a novelist, he was a powerful partner at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.) And it contemplates, with an almost scandalous perspicuity, the terrible price of that success.

Adam Kirsch