Friday, April 3, 2009

Defiance: The Bielski Partisans by Nechama Tec

Brothers Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski were Jews who formed a partisan unit in Western Belorussia during 1942. By 1944, when the area was liberated by the Red Army, the Bielski unit consisted of twelve hundred Jews who had been saved from the ghettos and concentration camps.

I watched the movie Defiance (starring Daniel Craig as Tuvia and Liev Schreiber as Zus) in January with Janelle and Dan and Katie. Afterwards I ordered the book and just now finished reading it. I have to say that this is one of those rare cases where I liked the movie way better than the book. The movie is not historically accurate. A lot is cut out and changed to make it more movie friendly and more watchable. If the movie followed the book, it would be a documentary.

The book is a quasi-pseudo academic book that focuses mostly on the sociology of the partisan movement in Western Belorussia. I say it's quasi-pseudo academic because it's not really, really academic. The author often presents arguments unsupported with facts and the book is full of conjecture ... but maybe that's just how sociologists write. (Nechama Tec is a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, she is a Jewish holocaust survivor herself.) The book focusses mainly on the mundane details of day to day life in the Bielski Otriad and it compares the Bielski Otriad to the many, many Russian partisan units in the surrounding forest. The book is more informative than engaging. It didn't really do it for me, especially not when it could have been informative and engaging! There are some very interesting parts in the book, but mostly it's just tedious.

I was expecting this book to be a quasi-biographical book about the Bielski brothers, but instead I ended up with a textbook on forest-dwelling partisan sociology. And I'm not a big fan of sociology. (My most boring classes in highschool and university!)

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