Book Review: The Plateau (WW2, anthropology) (OT)

The Plateau, by Maggie Paxson (Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2019, $28, 358 pages)

Every once in a while, you come upon a book that is a rare gem from the very first pages. (On the other hand, there are some books that you can tell in the first few pages you will find boring and time-taxing but must nevertheless read because you are a book reviewer.)

The Plateau, by author Maggie Paxson, falls into the former category.  I found the book so inspiring and thought-provoking that I looked up information about the locations, the incidents and the author whose writing style is so, so - melodic.

The Plots

Few books attempt the difficult task of going back and forth in time: The Plateau does so, and accomplishes it seamlessly as it relates two plots intersecting in location, not in time. One may only become mixed up towards the end (or if one reads only every few days) merely because one is slightly taxed reading such a long pair of stories (might it be shorter next time, please?)

The Plateau

The plateau, where Albert Camus wrote The Plague, is a region in south central France near the Alps where one small town of 2,000 residents, whose residents as a whole, protect hundreds if not thousands of immigrants and refugees without a thought to any possible danger (“Risk means facing fears. . . .” p. 180) during the Nazi occupation of the 30s and 40s as well as before and also in contemporary times with today’s influx of people from many countries. It is simply the right thing to do. The plateau is the region visited by our author, an anthropologist*, doing her fieldwork** (she lived there for a while after fieldwork in Soviet locations, and returns to visit).

The Stories

Author Maggie Paxson, PhD, lives in the plateau to try and determine why these residents do what they do and, also, to study peace (so many others have studied war) and why some people are good (“How to be good when it’s hard to be good.” p. 61). She finds that her great-grandmother’s rebel brother*** (one of 12 siblings) was “called” to this region to run a school for children from many countries (including Jewish children but not limited to them). Brother Daniel’s work with the children made him profoundly happy even as he decided not to pursue a doctorate during WW2 or to get married. For this decision, he ended up in Majdanek. . . .

Why?

Perhaps because “This physically beautiful place has somehow produced a morally beautiful people. . . .To be born here makes you good.” (p.55)

What I Would Change

Although I did (finally) understand the front cover illustrations and the innocuous title, I believe more people would find this book if it had a magnetic title or at least a subtitle – very minor comments, indeed.

On the whole, perhaps the best book this reviewer has read in a year!

*An anthropologist attempts to define who is us and who is them. A participant-observer, she searches to discern a group’s Law of Silence (“I didn’t understand the Law of Silence on the Plateau, but one day, I obeyed it anyway, and was silent. And then people began to speak.” p. 118) An anthropologist also attempts to discover who does what with whom.

*“*Fieldwork is always hard at the beginning. . . .You arrive, and almost immediately you are lost.” (p. 60)

***Primarily thanks to the detailed records of the Nazis, Paxson was able to follow Daniel’s life from his beginning in his family’s school in northern France, to Beirut, to the plateau, to Majdanek, to Israel where a tree has been planted in Daniel’s honor.

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“A French Village Committed to Deception” (BBC)

“A Culture of Selflessness” (WSJ)

“Ordinary People Risking Their Lives for an Extraordinary Purpose” (Wash. City Paper)