On June 28, 1914, which Serbia was celebrating as a national holiday, one Bosnian and five young Bosnian Serb nationalists plotted to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was visiting Sarajevo, capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The plans went awry, and the plotters were ready to give up. But the archduke's driver made a wrong turn and managed to stop right in front of Gavrilo Princip, the key conspirator, who had been about to go home. Instead, he jumped on the car's running board and killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne with one shot. Intending also to kill the governor of Bosnia, who was riding in the car, Princip missed and instead murdered the archduke's wife. Though the Habsburg Empire had been spoiling for a fight with Serbia, a nation reluctant to challenge the might of Austria-Hungary, neither side had envisioned that the consequences of their conflict in the Balkans might be a general European war. But the rest, as they say, is history.
Might such events be imagined differently? That is the task that practitioners of “counterfactual” or “alternative” history undertake—not only as a way of denying the determinism that chronological accounts of the chain of events may imply, and not only as a way of substituting different actors—or actors with different judgment and character—who might be considered capable of avoiding, say, the carnage of the First World War. Counterfactuals can illumine the patterns of causality that historians take for granted all too easily and can highlight the importance of contingency in governing human affairs. Such conjectures probably come more easily to novelists than to scholars. One recent instance is The Plot against America (2004), in which Philip Roth imagines what might have happened to his fellow Jews had the electorate picked the isolationist and appeaser Charles A. Lindbergh in 1940. Beginning in the same era, The Holocaust Averted wonders what might have been had Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stood up diplomatically to Hitler at Munich and had the Wehrmacht stalled in its campaign to conquer Czechoslovakia, sparing Poland from German occupation. Jeffrey S. Gurock, a historian best known for his studies of Orthodox Jewry and of New York City, is quick to acknowledge that the events that appear in his book are “fiction” (6). They are scrambled. The author must therefore be cut some slack when his retrospective musings on what never happened are evaluated.
His subtitle is decisive in limiting the scope of what his title suggests. The cover illustration for The Holocaust Averted shows railroad tracks that are diverted, as though their destination might have been other than Auschwitz. Yet this book devotes little space to the specific decisions that led to the Final Solution, and none to the historiographical controversies stemming from the genocidal policies of the Third Reich. Gurock's book thus bears no relation to another of Roth's forays into alternative history, such as The Ghost Writer (1979), as though—even as fantasy—Anne Frank might somehow have survived Bergen-Belsen.
Instead The Holocaust Averted traces the course of American political history, with no second general European war, and hence no need for Franklin D. Roosevelt to seek a third term. Instead, Senator Robert A. Taft becomes the people's choice, which this reviewer deems an early hint of implausibility, given the immense popularity of the New Deal and given the haughty aloofness that characterized that very conservative Ohio Republican. (For good reason, Taft never secured his party's nomination.) In Gurock's counterfactual version, Dwight D. Eisenhower could never have achieved greatness for having directed the crusade in Europe and, hence, would not have served two terms in the White House. Instead Richard M. Nixon manages to become president a dozen years ahead of schedule, but loses a reelection bid in 1960 to a Kennedy. But since the United States had never been drawn into any war against the Axis, Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was never killed in a dangerous aerial mission in 1944; and since his father expected his oldest son (rather than the scholarly and often sickly Jack) to pursue the grandest political ambitions, it is Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. who has to resolve the Cuban missile crisis and confront the challenge of civil rights.
This is all good clean fun, but the thrust of this alternative history is the fate of American Jewry itself. That is why Gurock devotes some space to sociologist Marshall Sklare and none to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Because only the Soviet Union annexes Poland, no Holocaust consciousness ever emerges in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. A fuller absorption of Jews into the national mainstream can therefore be achieved, without much lingering awareness that the Diaspora has so recently been a site of ineffable torment and the murder of millions of coreligionists. Without the shock of the Final Solution to register among American Jewry in different phases and with different levels of intensity, the process of integration is virtually complete. The author speculates that communal spokesmen and scholars thus feel obliged to produce books of lamentations, which excoriate the spiritual emptiness with which Judaism is practiced. What saves American Jewry from slow extinction, “a community in steep decline” (272), however, is the rebirth of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Gurock's speculative history of Israel varies little from what actually occurred, with military victories over the Arab states in the late 1940s as well as two decades later, and a dramatically heightened awareness among American Jews of the value of the Zionist struggle for independence and security.
The Holocaust Averted is therefore something of a hybrid. It plays out all sorts of events that never occurred, embedded within a narrative of what truly did happen. But the book suffers from its generic elusiveness, its hard-to-categorize ambiguity. Acquisitions librarians will be puzzled; historians may feel some dissatisfaction as well. Once the premise is installed that most of Europe managed to escape German occupation, the counterfactuals are rarely audacious enough to shed a dazzlingly new light on the past. The scaffolding that allows faux episodes to be plausible, however, requires Gurock to honor the authoritative interpretations of mid-twentieth-century history that are, of necessity, familiar. The conceptual tension that might have been struck by the disorienting juxtaposition of fiction and fact therefore fails to vibrate through The Holocaust Averted.
