05/16/2022
Journalist Kinstler debuts with a captivating investigation into “how the memory of the Holocaust extends into the present and acts upon it.” After the Nazis invaded Latvia in 1941, Kinstler’s paternal grandfather, Boris Kinstler, joined the Arajs Kommando, a Latvian police unit tasked with ridding the region of communists and Jews. In 1949, Boris disappeared from Latvia and was reported dead by Soviet authorities, fueling rumors that he’d been a KGB agent “charged with killing Latvian partisans.” Interwoven with Boris’s story is that of Herberts Cukurs, a famed Latvian aviator who also joined the Arajs Kommandos and was accused by eyewitnesses of participating in the Rumbula massacre. After escaping Allied authorities and settling in Brazil, Cukurs was assassinated by Mossad agents in 1965. Forty years later, the Latvian government opened an investigation into Cukurs that concluded there was “no evidence” he had taken part in “acts that qualify as genocide.” Though the links between Boris and Cukurs—which were first suggested to the author by a “cheap” Latvian spy novel that claims her grandfather was responsible for Cukurs’s fate—feel somewhat tenuous, Kinstler lucidly analyses the legal, cultural, and political matters involved. The result is a fascinating and often troubling account of how the past haunts the present. (Aug.)
In her completely absorbing and profound debut, Kinstler sets out to solve a mystery—journeying from a murder scene in Uruguay to the former killing fields of Europe to unravel a family secret about her late grandfather—and in the process unearths vexing questions about the past and how we understand it. Part detective story, part family history, part probing inquiry into how best to reckon with the horrors of a previous century, Come to This Court and Cry is bracingly original, beautifully written, and haunting. An astonishing book.”—Patrick Radden Keefe
“Obviously a masterpiece. A book that makes the Holocaust fresh, slipping seamlessly between story, thinking, politics, poetry, and the personal.”—Peter Pomerantsev
“Linda Kinstler has achieved something truly unusual: A book that captures the paradoxes and nuances of memory politics in contemporary Eastern Europe, while at the same time invoking the trauma that past tragedies leave on individuals and families. Using rigorous, evocative prose, she reminds us of the dangerous instability of truth and testimony, and the urgent need, in the twenty-first century, to keep telling the history of the twentieth.”—Anne Applebaum
“In this searching and powerful book, Kinstler sets out to solve the mystery of her grandfather’s role in the genocide of Latvia’s Jews during World War II. But the questions she ends up confronting—about national pride, the need for heroes, and the elusiveness of the past—couldn’t be more relevant in the twenty-first century. Come to This Court and Cry is an exemplary work of investigative journalism and historical research, showing why writers like Kinstler are needed now more than ever.”—Adam Kirsch
“First, I was moved, then I was gripped, and now I am haunted by Kinstler’s astonishing new book. Its story is a universal one and its contribution to Jewish thinking about the Holocaust is considerable.”—Ben Judah
“Before reading (devouring) Come to This Court and Cry, I wouldn’t have thought a book like this was even possible. A moving family portrait on top of a sensational whodunit murder on top of a brilliant mediation on memory, the law, and identity? And yet here it is. Kinstler has threaded the needle. This book is many things, and yet it fits together perfectly—personal without being sentimental, creative without being precious, and has such astute legal and historical analyses without being ponderous; it’s a marvel.”—Menachem Kaiser
“[A] gripping debut… a deeply researched, engrossing and important look at how Holocaust stories have been passed down and altered.”—Washington Post
“Journalist Kinstler debuts with a captivating investigation…The result is a fascinating and often troubling account of how the past haunts the present.”—Publishers Weekly
“A masterful synthesis of family history and Holocaust investigation that blurs lines among perpetrators, justice, and national identity… A vital addition to the finite canon of Holocaust studies rooted in personal connection.”—Kirkus, starred review
“A tremendous feat of storytelling, propelled by numerous twists and revelations, yet anchored by a deep moral seriousness.”—The Guardian
“Come to This Court and Cry combines meticulous historical research with philosophical inquiries into nationalism, holocaust denial, guilt and the burden of proof. This is an invaluable and highly readable account.”—New Internationalist’s Alternative Book Review
“This important book is part mystery, part history, and part parable for our time. And the title is, as Kinstler later explains, less a cry for justice than a mourning for what cannot be fixed.”—Pema Levy, Mother Jones
“[An] intelligent and thoughtful study.”—The Times’ Literary Supplement
“[A]n exquisite exploration.”—Wall Street Journal
“She traces its twists and turns with patience, care, and a burning sense of integrity, bringing the reader into an answerless place between conflicting witness testimonies, between history and literary narratives, and between what is recorded as evidence and what is otherwise passed down or felt.”—Jewish Currents
“[A] remarkable book.”—Jewish Chronicle
“Kinstler enthralls audiences.”—Library Journal
“Avoiding any simplistic or definitive conclusions, Kinstler provides a model of deep historical research and fluid, engaging narrative.”—New York Journal of Books
“There has never been a better time to read a book such as this…As a historian, she is engaged in neither flight nor fight. She skillfully invites readers into the complexity of her craft.”—Sydney Morning Herald
“Powerful… compelling.”—Forward
08/01/2022
This book by Politico contributor Kinstler starts with a scene from a World War II spy thriller that features the author's grandfather, who had disappeared decades ago. She spends the book investigating how true that scene really was, tracing him in historical accounts and photographs, and trying to find out who he really was. Her probing leads to uncovering his connections to war crimes, the KGB, and the infamous "Butcher of Riga" Herberts Cukurs and his posthumous prosecution. She shows how firsthand accounts of the Holocaust are recorded, remembered, muddled with age, and difficult to use in criminal proceedings. She also examines how nations and communities reckon with the Holocaust, how the survivors' stories are honored or distorted, and how some family secrets or mysteries are well-known to others. At times, there is an abundance of information, narratives get confusing as they skip around timelines and countries, and readers will occasionally forget who's at the center of the book, but Kinstler enthralls audiences as clues are revealed. VERDICT For those who were enthralled by Deborah Lipstadt's Denial or Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men.—Amanda Ray
★ 2022-05-18
A masterful synthesis of family history and Holocaust investigation that blurs lines among perpetrators, justice, and national identity.
Kinstler, the former managing editor of the New Republic, captures a worrisome historical reality in our current moment of creeping authoritarianism. “Survivors have been telling the story of the Holocaust for the better part of a century,” she writes, “and still the judges ask for proof.” Her grim landscape is the “Holocaust by bullets” in the Baltic states following the Soviet Union’s brutal annexation. When the Nazis invaded, local auxiliaries in Latvia, the Arajs Kommando, outdid the Germans in cruelty, murdering Jews without remorse. Aviator Herberts Cukurs, one key member, ducked culpability after the war, but he was assassinated by Mossad in 1965 in Uruguay. (For more on Cukurs, see Stephan Talty’s The Good Assassin.) Kinstler was drawn to the story via a haunting connection: Her long-vanished grandfather, Boris, was also in the Kommando, but he may have been a double agent for the Russians (he “officially” committed suicide following the war). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the release of reams of Holocaust documentation, including perpetrator and survivor testimonies, Latvian nationalists and revisionists sought to rehabilitate Cukurs in strange ways, including an operatic stage musical that “sought to absolve both him and his nation from any allegations of complicity.” This also led to renewed investigations into both his murder and his activities inside the Riga ghetto and subsequent massacres of Jews, all of which fueled Kinstler’s determined investigation. “I remained bewildered that, so many decades after the Second World War, questions of complicity, culpability, rehabilitation and restitution were still making their way through the courts,” she writes. The author writes with literary flair and ambition, highlighting the important stories of surviving principals and delving into such relevant topics as jurisprudence, post–Cold War Eastern Europe, and cultural efforts to come to terms with, or rationalize, still-obscured aspects of the Holocaust.
A vital addition to the finite canon of Holocaust studies rooted in personal connection.
