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A review by jjupille
East West Street by Philippe Sands
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Sands is a legendary international lawyer and here he weaves the threads of his grandfather Leon and celebrated international lawyers Raphael Lemkin (who originated the legal concept of genocide) and Hersch Lauterpacht (who originaed the legal concept of crimes against humanity). All three of these Jewish men have early-to-mid 20th century connections to Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv in what is now Ukraine and its environs, and had personal / family experience of the horrors that people can inflict on each other on ground bringing so many different folks into proximity. A fourth protagonist is the Nazi governor of the region around Lemberg during WWII, who implemented the Final Solution there - Treblinka was in his territory.
Lemkin and Lauterpacht articulated alternative frameworks for thinking about The Final Solution and the rest of the Nazi atrocities. Lemkin favored the notion of genocide, the systematic extermination of a group of people. Lauterpact favored an individual conception of human rights. So the group vs. the individual conceptions were contending. Ironically, given that this is in Sands's professional wheelhouse, I found his elucidation of these rival concepts to be somewhat weak, betrayed in part by the author's apparent preference for Lauterpacht's conception. He just never really does justice to the idea of genocide, and the critique of the concept - that it would reify the very collective identities that it was trying to defang - didn't persuade me. Lemkin is kind of desperate and nutty and workmanlike, while Lauterpacht is plugged in, refined, brilliantly original. With one pillar so robust and the other so withered, this basic dichotomy doesn't entirely suffice to hold up the intellectual edifice.
Still - Sands writes wonderfully, he narrates the research process with glee and enthusiasm, he grapples with the personal and the abstract, and he offers a wonderfully rich window onto the historical forces radiating around and through Lemberg. Especially as the city (now Lviv, Ukraine) is again the site of man's inhumanity to man, the timeless themes at play feel especially timely. I recommend this highly.
Lemkin and Lauterpacht articulated alternative frameworks for thinking about The Final Solution and the rest of the Nazi atrocities. Lemkin favored the notion of genocide, the systematic extermination of a group of people. Lauterpact favored an individual conception of human rights. So the group vs. the individual conceptions were contending. Ironically, given that this is in Sands's professional wheelhouse, I found his elucidation of these rival concepts to be somewhat weak, betrayed in part by the author's apparent preference for Lauterpacht's conception. He just never really does justice to the idea of genocide, and the critique of the concept - that it would reify the very collective identities that it was trying to defang - didn't persuade me. Lemkin is kind of desperate and nutty and workmanlike, while Lauterpacht is plugged in, refined, brilliantly original. With one pillar so robust and the other so withered, this basic dichotomy doesn't entirely suffice to hold up the intellectual edifice.
Still - Sands writes wonderfully, he narrates the research process with glee and enthusiasm, he grapples with the personal and the abstract, and he offers a wonderfully rich window onto the historical forces radiating around and through Lemberg. Especially as the city (now Lviv, Ukraine) is again the site of man's inhumanity to man, the timeless themes at play feel especially timely. I recommend this highly.