Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust by Ari Joskowicz (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust by Ari Joskowicz
• Natasza Gawlick

Ari Joskowicz, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2023. 351 pp.

In his incisive monograph, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, published by Princeton UP in 2023, Ari Joskowicz explores the related experiences of Jews and Roma within the context of the Holocaust, with a particular focus on institutions that play a role in justice, representation, and advocacy. Over the course of six chapters (not including the introduction), Joskowicz traces the simultaneously distinct and intertwined fates of Roma and Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust. As the author states in his preface, this is not a book on memory, nor a book based on his Jewish ancestors' legacy (xi). Rather, Joskowicz is sensitive to issues of self-representation and the differing levels of recognition given to various victim groups by investigating the following questions: How do we know about the suffering of others? What role do institutions (and individuals), political entities, financial means, and testimonies play in the production of knowledge, history, and memory?

Joskowicz approaches these questions by discussing specific examples of Roma-Jewish relations, interactions, or observations in each of his chapters. Following the introduction, which naturally lays out the text's purpose and fundamental inquiry, the first chapter centers on the convergence of oppressive measures and treatment perpetrated against Roma and Jews through the 1930s and into the early years of the war. These parallel experiences of violence and injustice include mass shootings committed by Einsatzgruppen, special killing squads, deportation to labor camps, and confinement in ghettos. Joskowicz effectively demonstrates both the intersections and diverse nature of experiences faced by Sinti and Roma during this time. He cites a long pattern of anti-Romani policing that contributed to a lack of attention devoted to the imprisonment and policies against Romani people in postwar historiography. Conversely, the violence against Jews signaled a distinct shift in treatment that dominated the focus of postwar Holocaust studies. Despite this reference to the widespread existence of anti-Romani policing in Europe, no further examples or context of pre-1930 anti-Roma policies or initiatives are provided in the text or in the footnotes. Including these could have provided readers important context and justification for the more "accepted" marginalization of Roma leading up to 1939.

Chronologically and thematically organized, the chapters in Rain of Ash [End Page 126] each focus on aspects that influenced postwar historiography and recognition (or lack thereof) of the Jewish and Roma genocide. Joskowicz provides an in-depth examination of several organizations, individuals, and court proceedings throughout the book's chapters, in which he investigates the way both larger institutions and particular individuals contributed to the dispensation of justice, such as the construction of memorials and monetary or material reparations. Joskowicz includes an impressive breadth of sources—discussing examples from France, Austria, Great Britain, and Germany, among others—to illustrate the way that Roma traditionally turned to Jewish organizations to demand their respective rights and equity: "Jews' experiences during the war were still better known, and documenting them tended to accrue certain legal rights…. Proving suffering in the same places as Jews, or in similar ways, was often Romanies' best bet at receiving recognition and compensation of their own after the war" (64).

Holocaust Studies is dominated by scholarship centered on experiences of Jewish victims, but the discipline nonetheless underwent a change in the late twentieth century, as scholars such as Ian Hancock, David Crowe, and Anton Weiss-Wendt brought awareness to the Roma genocide. Joskowicz critically adds to the discipline of Holocaust Studies by offering a fresh perspective: whereas texts by the aforementioned authors largely focus on understanding the Nazis' persecution of Roma based on racial grounds, Joskowicz interrogates the role of institutions and systems that dictated postwar historiography and the (greater) recognition of the Jewish and (lesser) awareness of the Roma genocide.

Rain of Ash would be especially suited for scholars of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as those studying judicial practices related to human rights abuses. Furthermore, through its inclusion of a variety of sources and the structural...