Wiesenthal considered

Tom Segev’s “Simon WIesenthal” The life and Legends” (Doubleday) has just been published and is getting some interesting response. A positive and stirring review from Dwight Garner in the New York Times, “The Man Who Refused to Forget,” and a more critical by equally passionate one by Ron Rosenbaum, “Self made Golem” at Tablet, the online publication.

I have not read the book yet but I look forward to doing so.

Disclosure: i know Tom and we emailed when he began the project — and of course, my father knew Wiesenthal. Segev told me he had come across some correspondence between them and I am curious to see if any of that turns up or informs the book.

From the reviews, it sounds like Segev pretty much agrees with the take I took in my obituary column on Wiesenthal:

“Wiesenthal The Collector”

a complicated individual, a man with great faults who cared when others didn’t and made the world pay attention when they didn’t, who pursued those Holocaust criminals who imagined no one would survive to make the account for their crimes, or worse yet no one would care, who was, in the words of one of the reviews, “a necessary irritant.”

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