Book Review | In Love with Life—and Himself
By Alan A. Stone
DucClaude Lanzmann is known on this side of the Atlantic as the Frenchman who created the monumental film, Shoah. He tells us that American Jews did not contribute a single penny to his efforts. Lanzmann traveled all over the United States, hat in hand, trying to raise money from wealthy Jews. They wanted to know what his ultimate message was going to be or, more galling to him, pontificated about what it should be. If truth be told, Lanzmann did not know exactly where his decade-long project would take him. His method was to immerse himself in the facts, talk to the experts, track down and film the Jewish survivors, the Poles who watched and the Germans who made the Holocaust happen.
Only after years of this effort did he “imagine” what Shoah would be! The...