Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosu ´a. By Allen Wells. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2009. Pp. 447. Cloth $99.95. ISBN 978-0822343899. Paper $27.95. ISBN 978-0-8223-4407-0.

摘要

In the early 1940s, several hundred Jewish refugees from Germany and Austrianfound a safe haven in a remote but beautiful spot on the northern coast ofnthe Dominican Republic. With the explicit backing of the Roosevelt Administration, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee established,nfunded, and micromanaged an agricultural colony for Jewish e ´migre ´s from NazinGermany at a former banana plantation. At first glance, the history of the Sosu ´ancolony might appear as an intriguing but almost irrelevant footnote of WorldnWar II and the Holocaust. Tropical Zion, however, represents a significantncontribution to transnational history because author Alan Wells skillfullyninterweaves the story of the colony with several contexts that are oftennstudied separately: United States diplomatic history, the Jewish refugee crisisnof the late 1930s, the political and economic history of the Dominican Republic,nand the protracted history of Jewish agricultural settlement schemes in the SovietnUnion and the Americas.