A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. Translated by Alex Skinner,. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 416 pp

Following long-standing policy, the Allies recognized only nation-states in restitution cases; they had no precedent to follow in the case of European Jews, whose communities had been destroyed and property stolen in Germany and German-occupied countries. An unusual coalition of Jewish scholars and intellectuals led this effort, which helps explain why there was such intense, even obsessive attention to books at a time of dire need among surviving European Jews. Gallas does a superb job analyzing how JCR and other book rescuers contributed to the emergence of a transnational Jewish collectivity, but historians should also deconstruct that very concept for the ways it effaces national and other differences in the Jewish cultural response to looted books.