In Conversation: The Unknown Refugees:  Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War

Adina Hoffman is an essayist and biographer. She is the author of four previous books, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. Ben Hecht was, according to Pauline Kael, “the greatest American screenwriter.” Jean-Luc Godard called him “a genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts—including Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Notorious— Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine’s Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared “child of the century” came to embody much that defined America—especially Jewish America—in his time. In Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures (Yale University Press) Adina Hoffman offers a vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. He was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman—biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics—is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes. David Denby wrote in The New Yorker that “Adina Hoffman’s superb [book]… loads Hecht’s staggering contradictions into a compact but abounding two hundred twenty pages…. She writes with enormous flair.”

David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie and The Chief. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians. David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (Penguin Press) tells the until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. The surrender of German forces to the Allied powers in May 1945, put an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of the war went on for years. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered them and attempted to repatriate them. But more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany — Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans — refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. It’s a story with profound contemporary resonance, and shows us that it is our history as well. In a starred review Kirkus