The Record, May 18, 2004 (Waterloo Region) Author draws parallels between Holocaust, plight of today's Jews Second Catastrophe is a fictitious story of real-life events that threaten Israel Writen By LUISA D'AMATO The cover of Howard Rotberg's The Second Catastrophe shows the Israeli flag soaked in blood. The Second Catastrophe, a book written by lawyer, historian and former Kitchener land developer Howard Rotberg, is an uncompromising and deeply disturbing political and historical study of the threat to Jewish people today. It starts as something else -- a novel in which a Canadian Jewish university professor rushes to Israel, where his daughter has been badly hurt in a terrorist attack. While waiting for his daughter to recover, widower Norman Rosenfeld thinks, writes and falls in love. Rotberg intertwines the story of his characters with the chapters of Rosenfeld's book as they are finished, and its powerful, devastating message. His belief is that the Jews of the world are now facing a "second Holocaust," in which the terrorism of fundamentalist Islam and its resolve to drive the Jews into the sea is supported by anti-Semitic Europe and too often tolerated by North America, whose news media derides "all violence" in a false objectivity, rather than distinguishing between these acts. Rosenfeld's fictitious book goes through real-life events in history and in the present, some well-known and some not, to knit together his compelling and discomfiting argument. He speaks of the hatred engendered by anti-Semitic myths in the Arab world, such as the old, ugly story repeated in Egyptian media that Jews use the blood of Palestinian babies to make matzo (unleavened bread). Or that a recent study of dozens of textbooks for Palestinian children show that none refer to the concept of peace with Israel, the state of Israel, or the existence of Jewish holy places within. Rotberg also draws parallels between the Holocaust and today. There is the little-known story of Shmuel Artur Zygielbojm, who desperately tried to gain Allied support for the Warsaw ghetto resistance, then killed himself in 1943 in a last attempt to draw attention to the plight of the Jews. Zygielbojm left a suicide note explaining his death, but it was never reported in the news media, and so his sacrifice proved useless. This story is offered in tandem with that of Jonathan Pollard, an American naval intelligence analyst who in the 1980s discovered nuclear and biological warfare capabilities being developed, for use against Israel in such countries as Syria, Iraq, Libya and Iran. Pollard discovered that this information was being kept from the Israelis by an U.S. government nervous about what the Jewish state would do with it. He listened to his conscience, passed on the information directly to Israel so that it could protect itself and is spending the rest of his life in prison. His was a far harsher sentence than that received by counterparts who passed classified information to the Soviets or to Arab countries. Rotberg describes Pollard as another visionary who was silenced, "the first to see the coming of the Second Holocaust," years before Iraq used poison gas against Kurds, and the United States was attacked with anthrax. This book isn't perfect. The reader hungers for more complete references and footnotes in the analysis, and Rotberg tells the Jews' story of betrayal by the rest of the world far more compellingly than he tells a love story. But the undeniable power of this book, and its uncompromising point of view, is that once you have read it, you will never again watch the TV news, or read a headline about the Middle East, in the same way. The Canadian Jewish News December 11, 2003 Real-life events the backdrop for study of anti-Semitism. Written By CYNTHIA GASNER Special to The CJN. The Second Catastrophe, the first full-length novel by Howard Rotberg, is actually two books in one - the first is narrative fiction, while the second is a well-researched historical account of issues facing Israel and the Jewish people. Rotberg was born and raised in Brantford, Ont., and has degrees in both history and law from the University of Toronto. He practised corporate law for 20 years in Kitchener, but sold his law practice in 1997 to focus on writing and land development. He has written for a number of newspapers and magazines. Rotberg's main character, widower Norman Rosenfeld, is a cultural historian at a small Canadian university. He is also an Orthodox Jew. The professor is in the midst of writing a controversial book about Israel and the Jewish people when he learns that his daughter, who is in a one-year program at Hebrew University, has been injured by a Palestinian terrorist attack at a restaurant in Jerusalem at the height of the second intifadah. He rushes to Israel with his father, a Holocaust survivor named Lucky, who, despite the horrors he experienced during the war, is a perpetual optimist. In Israel, Rosenfeld meets and falls in love with a secular Israeli doctor. Using the fictional story as a backdrop, Rotberg intersperses passages from the professor's non-fiction work, titled The Second Holocaust: Radical Islamism, Western Complicity, and the Israeli Political/Cultural Response, throughout the novel. The excerpts, based on actual historic information, examine such subjects as the history of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the nature of Islam, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, Jewish anti-Zionism and Sept. 11. Rotberg's book contains a number of interwoven themes. In addition to confronting contemporary issues in his own book and in his life, Rosenfeld, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, also tries to deal with his feelings of despair about what happened to Jews in the Shoah. We learn that as a teenager, Rosenfeld studied the Torah and other religious writings to try to come to terms with God's role in human history and how a just and merciful deity could allow the suffering of innocent Jews. Rotberg also uses Rosenfeld to examine the ideological assault on Israel by extremist Arab leaders, European countries, the United Nations and the media, and he draws a parallel between the events of the 1930s and the current situation. The reader is left to decide if these parallels and Rosenfeld's perceptions are valid. But whether one agrees with his thesis or not, the fictional professor sounds a profound and striking note of alarm. He draws a direct line from the Wansee Conference, as the beginning of the Holocaust, to the United Nations' 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and finally to what he calls "the second Holocaust." Militant Islam, the professor writes, is a complete revolt against western enlightenment, just as Nazism was a revolt against the Ten Commandments as bequeathed by the Jews to the western world. The Jews, Rosenfeld contends, were to be punished as the proponents of these values. The reader can see from the professor's fictional background why he would take such a pessimistic view of world events. In quoting research done by the professor, Rotberg quotes philosophers, politicians, historians, journalists and others who warn that to minimize the threat to the Jews is not an option, as it could lead to the destruction of the Jewish people. Through his protagonist, Rotberg argues that the Arabs' genocidal goal is the removal of the Jewish presence from what they perceive to be Muslim territory - despite their rhetoric for western consumption. Along with the author's compelling arguments, the relationships in the novel force the reader to asses for themselves the challenges faced by Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora. Rotberg has done his research and added human emotions and frailties so that readers are both moved by the drama and informed by his global perspective. The Second Catastrophe (Mantua Books) was launched recently at Israel's The Judaica Centre and is available at bookstores across the country. Howard Rotberg, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author. Toronto: Mantua Books, 2003. 191 pp. Reviewed by Dennis Stoutenburg. The Second Catastrophe by Howard Rotberg effectively merges contemporary historical writing and narrative fiction in a creative and compelling manner. It is a masterful portrait of irreconcilable struggles, global and local, distant and immediate, collective and personal, as they have become heightened by the unthinkable events of September 11, 2001. Before that tragic day, the eyes of the world were already squarely fixed on acts of terrorism in the Middle East. The Al Aqsa Intifada, or Second Intifada, intensified an already keen interest in the West's obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For some, Israeli incursions into the West Bank on the one hand, or Palestinian suicide bombings on the other hand, provided adequate justification for preexisting positions. For many more, however, the rapidly escalating situation on the ground merely served to further cloud an already compromised and confusing reality. At that time in the West, there was no familiar standard by which to compare, evaluate, and judge what had become a daily Middle Eastern drama. Not in a day but in a single hour, this was about to change forever. As a result of the morning of September 11, we now all find ourselves at times willingly and at other times unwillingly replaying the horrific details of that tragic morning - repeatedly. As an historian, Rotberg has carefully selected, judiciously edited, and impressively reformatted hundreds of minute details of daily history from actual pages of Western newspapers to create a compelling story of a man who finds himself traveling to Israel during these troubled times because his daughter, a visiting student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has become a victim of Palestinian terrorism. The reader cannot escape being caught up in a web of emotions and thoughts that such human drama demands. As an historian, Rotberg has also done the work that we all wish we could be able to do in order to better understand not only the events themselves but also to ascertain their immediate and global implications. No one who reads The Second Catastrophe can leave unaffected or uninformed. As importantly, the reader will begin to appreciate a sinister correlation between daily acts of terror against innocent civilians in Israeli streets, a longstanding "war" of attrition against Jews in their homeland, and the painful and murderous events of September 11 in New York City, acts that initiated the current "global war" against terrorism. As a creative writer, Rotberg advances literary form on several fronts. While choosing the form of historical fiction, Rotberg has made a novel contribution to this familiar literary genre. He has placed a historical book of non-fiction within a book of historical fiction. Readers gain much, both in detail and perspective, about relevant current events from chapters of historical non-fiction that the author has brilliantly woven into his main story-line. While I have not seen this literary technique in any former writing, I appreciate the honesty that it brings to the reader. Other historical fictions weave fact and myth, non-fiction and fiction inseparably in such a manner that it becomes impossible to know what is and what is not true. In the case of The Second Catastrophe however, the reader has a strong sense of knowing when the characters of the fictional story are speaking and when the events of history with which we have become too familiar are in play. Finally, as a child of a Holocaust survivor himself, Rotberg contributes to a growing collection of works in a genre of literature produced by children of survivors. In exposing the nature and identifying features of a second holocaust, he tangentially provides his own insightful perspective on the (first) Holocaust. As well, Rotberg courageously faces complex and arguably unresolvable issues of Jewish identity that are foremost in personal and community Jewish consciousness today. Many of us feel we cannot get enough hard data on historical background to and daily life leading up to and immediately following the consciousness-raising events of September 11. Further, some of us wish to think through the complexities and possible links between a world that looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and incinerated just over 50 years ago and today's world that tends to treat with similar deference the frequent murder of men, women, and children by suicide bombers in the streets of the only Western-styled Democracy in the Middle East. Many more of us can no longer justify remaining ignorant to history and injustice as it unfolds dramatically before our eyes. Howard Rotberg's The Second Catastrophe satisfies each of these needs and desires in a most creatively stimulating and accessibly informative way. Dr. Dennis Stoutenburg has his doctorate from University of Strasburg and has taught at universities in British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario.

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