A Revisionist's History
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CURRENT BOOKS the 1820s and ’30s. It would have been interesting concentration camps. When the Soviets returned to learn about Odessa’s role during the collecti- to Odessa in 1944, they counted 48 surviving vization of agriculture in Soviet Ukraine, when Jews. As King shows, the particular horror that the grain that might have fed a starving popu- befell Odessan Jews during the war was blurred lation was instead exported from Black Sea ports. by postwar Soviet propaganda about a “hero city” It would also have been interesting to learn how united in suffering and resistance to fascism and Odessa, still a multinational city, suffered from the by the fact that the postwar communist regime in mass national shooting operations of Stalin’s Romania was an important Soviet ally. Great Terror of 1937–38. Odessa, today a pleasant seaside city of 1.2 mil- Yet King must attend to myth if he is to make lion people in independent Ukraine, powerfully one of his major points: Nostalgia for Odessa, resists historical placement. It fits neither national Soviet and otherwise, has much to do with its narratives of Ukrainian liberation nor nostalgic Jewish population, as presented, for example, in tropes of Russian revivalism. The city still seems Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales (1931), a collection of rooted in nothing except itself and the works of short stories set in the city’s Jewish quarter, Mol- genius of natives and admirers such as Babel and davanka. At the same time, too little is known Eisenstein. It ought to be an inescapable part of about the extermination of Odessan Jews during Western histories of the Holocaust and modern World War II, when Soviet power was absent. Europe. Yet, with important exceptions such as Odessa’s Jews fell victim not to Germany, but to Patricia Herlihy’s foundational 2002 book Odessa: Germany’s ally Romania. A History, 1794–1914, it has generally escaped When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in them. King makes a virtue of these difficulties, tak- June 1941, Romania was the most important of ing the city on its own engaging terms. His writing the Third Reich’s allies. The Romanian army in- is aesthetic without superficiality, and erudite with- vaded southern Ukraine, and placed a large out pretension. Reading the book is like traveling as region known as Transnistria under its own con- your best self, the self that you never quite are, trol. After a bomb planted by operatives of the ready with every reference, worldly and wise. Be- Soviet state police, the NKVD, killed Romanian cause King opens a difficult world with grace, the occupation authorities in Odessa, the Romanians book’s ending comes, as it should, as a shock. murdered perhaps half of the 50,000 Jews then in the city. The remaining half, like Jews in other Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. He is the author, most recently, of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin territories conquered by Romania, were sent to (2010). A Revisionist’s History Reviewed by David J. Garrow In 1965, a fascinating important black freedom advocate has appeared in political voice was silenced when MALCOLM X: more than 35 years, but now, in the appropriately ALife of a team of assassins gunned down titled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Columbia Reinvention. Malcolm X, a man whose intel- University professor Manning Marable fills this void By Manning Marable. lectual and religious journey had Viking. 594 pp. $30 with a landmark book that reflects not only finally transformed him into an thorough research and accessible prose but, most eloquent spokesman for human equality. No com- impressively, unvarnished assessments and consis- prehensive and credible biography of this signally tently acute interpretive judgments. 90 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2011 CURRENT BOOKS Malcolm, of course, chron- icled—or authorized journalist Alex Haley to chronicle—his own life in his famous The Autobiogra- phy of Malcolm X, published nine months after he died, but Marable definitively establishes that the Autobiography omitted some sig- nificant aspects of Malcolm’s youthful criminal life while dramatically exaggerating others. Several chapters Malcolm had pre- pared were deleted before publica- tion, and he did not review impor- tant portions of what millions of readers would think of as “his polit- ical testament.” The Autobiography as published, Marable warns, “is more Haley’s than its author’s.” Born in 1925, Malcolm Little spent his early years in Lansing, Michigan. His childhood was replete with family tragedies: His physically abusive father died vio- lently when Malcolm was six, his mother was confined to a mental hospital when he was 14, and the Malcolm X addresses a Harlem rally in support of desegregation in Birmingham,Alabama, in older half-sister who took custody 1963.Increasingly,he devoted himself to the civil rights movement before his murder in 1965. of him was arrested repeatedly for various minor crimes after Malcolm went to live began an odyssey during which Malcolm would with her in Boston. Malcolm quit school in ninth reinvent himself several times over. He spent six and grade, and by age 19 his preference for theft and a half years, from ages 20 to 27, incarcerated in robbery over regular employment had earned him Massachusetts prisons before being paroled. his first of several arrests. Marable corroborates the Lennon visited him, but the man who most changed evidence first presented in Bruce Perry’s valuable his life was fellow convict John Elton Bembry, 20 but flawed 1991 biography, Malcolm: The Life of a years Malcolm’s senior, who challenged him to Man Who Changed Black America, that Malcolm develop his intellect by using the prison library and developed a close relationship with William Paul enrolling in correspondence courses. By 1948, when Lennon, a wealthy gay white man in his late fifties, one of Malcolm’s brothers told him that he and who paid Malcolm for sex. other family members had converted to the Nation Malcolm also had an older white girlfriend and of Islam (NOI) and wanted Malcolm to convert too, partner in crime, whom he physically abused. When the young prisoner had acquired a profound intel- Malcolm’s sloppiness allowed the police to unravel lectual earnestness. their small burglary gang, his girlfriend testified The NOI had been founded in 1930 by a myste- against him and served seven months, while rious mixed-race man who disappeared in 1934 and Malcolm was sentenced to eight to 10 years. Thus was succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, née Poole, a Spring 2011 ■ Wilson Quarterly 91 CURRENT BOOKS Georgia native who headquartered the small sect in ever before, and advertised the dominance of the Chicago. The Nation of Islam was Islamic in name NOI’s militant all-male internal enforcement arm, only, for Muhammad’s teachings represented an the Fruit of Islam. oddball amalgam of black nationalism and science- The year 1957 marked a period of “tremen- fiction cosmology that bore only the slightest dous growth for Malcolm,” Marable writes. As the relation to the Muslim black freedom struggle in America gained faith. By the late 1940s momentum, Malcolm’s interest turned toward Frustrated African- the NOI had fewer than arguments over the civil rights movement’s Americans responded to a thousand members, agenda. He “no longer saw himself exclusively as Malcolm X’s angry but but for the newly seri- an NOI minister,” and that put him in increasing articulate condemnations ous young prisoner the tension with the sect’s leadership. The NOI’s black of white racism and group “became the nationalism was essentially apolitical, and Elijah black passivity. starting point for a spiri- Muhammad could “maintain his personal author- tual journey that would ity only by forcing his followers away from the consume Malcolm’s life.” outside world.” The NOI taught that blacks’ true ancestral sur- Soon after rejection by a longtime girlfriend, names had been lost during slavery, and Malcolm, Malcolm in January 1958 married Betty Sanders, a like most members, adopted X as his new last name. nurse and NOI member with whom he had shared Malcolm mastered Muhammad’s doctrine, and a handful of awkward dates. The partnership was by mid-1953, less than a year after his release from deeply troubled from the outset. Betty combatively prison, he was a full-time NOI minister. He was not opposed the “patriarchal behavior” of her husband yet 30 years old. Malcolm’s rhetorical prowess soon and the NOI, and Malcolm “rarely, if ever, displayed emerged as one of the sect’s greatest assets, and by affection toward her.” Within a year, Malcolm was 1955 membership had grown to some 6,000, in writing to Elijah to confess that she was complain- large part thanks to Malcolm’s efforts. Over the next ing “that we were incompatible sexually because I six years the ranks of the NOI reached upward of had never given her any real satisfaction” and was 50,000 as frustrated African Americans responded threatening to seek it elsewhere. When, nonetheless, to Malcolm’s angry but articulate condemnations of Betty gave birth to several children, Malcolm white racism and black passivity. Malcolm both de- absented himself and treated his wife “largely as a nounced all whites (“We have a common oppressor, nuisance.” a common exploiter. He’s an enemy to all of us”) Growing tensions between Malcolm and the and derided mainstream civil rights leaders as NOI’s ruling circle eclipsed those at home. “The “nothing but modern Uncle Toms” who “keep you national leadership increasingly viewed the rank and me in check, keep us under control, keep us and file as a cash register,” Marable writes, and Eli- passive and peaceful and nonviolent.” jah had developed a habit of impregnating the Muhammad assigned Malcolm to the NOI’s young women who worked in his office—including Harlem temple.