Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945, by Joanna Newman

摘要

This excellent new book by Joanna Newman featured an unusual genesis. Itwas while working on seventeenth-century Barbados that she stumbled uponrecords dealing withJewish immigration to the Caribbean in the twentieth century.Her study of this later wave, which was incommensurate in scope withthe early modern one, revealed continuities and ruptures among diasporic andmigratory trends. Nearly the New World tracks the experiences and challengesfaced by European Jewish migrants to the British Caribbean in the 1930s and1940s, with an epilogue that brings the story up to the present. The book’s focusis by definition transnational, whether in assessing international aid debatesor in following the itinerary of the refugees themselves. Their many extensivelycited testimonies bring Newman’s story to life.