JUNE 2 • 2022 | 49

America, families then told their children 
the soothing falsehood that their names 
were inadvertently changed at Ellis Island. 
Horn records, though, that Ellis Island had 
a staff of multilingual experts who checked 
travelers’ names against the names on ships’ 
manifests. Names did not get changed at 
Ellis Island. The soothing story preserves 
America’s good name as a haven for Jewish 
immigrants and covers the shame of those 
who feel embarrassed at having abandoned 
their family names. 
Horn calls things by their 
proper names, but she, perhaps 
uncharacteristically, sympathizes 
with those who distorted the story 
of how they got their American-
sounding last names. She notes 
that Jewish communities around 
the world preserve wishful legends 
about how their friendly non-Jew-
ish neighbors welcomed the Jews 
who first came to this place. 
Sites around the world that 
once had Jewish communities 
now make expensive efforts to 
reconstruct their now-empty syn-
agogues and study-halls, and even 
to build new museums of local 
Jewish culture. Leaders hope to 
attract tourists — primarily Jewish 
tourists — to view these memori-
als with nostalgia and affection. 
Horn herself travels to these 
venues, but they leave her feel-
ing queasy. The memorials to a 
once-thriving Jewish community 
do not feature exhibits about what 
happened to make the Jews disap-
pear. Somehow, these venues have 
warm nostalgia for the Jews who 
used to live here, but only after 
those Jews have been murdered or 
at least driven away. 
One example of a memorial to a depart-
ed Jewish community: In 1896, when the 
Czarist regime built the Trans-Siberian 
Railway, the planners needed a hub in 
Manchuria, a frozen land adjoining Siberia. 
Industrialists could build a town where 
none existed, but which wealthy industri-
alists would want to live there? The czar’s 
minister of finance had a brilliant idea: 
Jews who needed to flee the Russian’s own 

pogroms and antisemitic laws. Wealthy Jews 
did build the hub, the city of Harbin, and 
poor Jews joined them, especially after the 
Russian Revolution; so, Harbin became a 
home to thousands of Jews, until it wasn’t. 
Japan conquered Manchuria in 1931, 
and, with help from anti-Communist 
White Russians, claimed Jewish-owned 
businesses. The Soviets took over in 1945 
and sent Jewish leaders to the gulag. When 
the Chinese conquered Manchuria in 1949, 
they allowed the remaining Jews to leave for 

Israel, if they would abandon all their prop-
erty. Now Harbin, with its one returned Jew, 
works at building an affectionate memorial 
to its long-departed Jewish community. 
Visiting Harbin leaves Horn uncomfortable. 
Horn asks, how did the diary of Anne 
Frank become the best-known account of 
the genocidal war against the Jews? How 
did one sentence become the most-often 
quoted, the “lesson” of Anne Frank’s work? 
Anne Frank wrote, “I still believe, in spite 

of everything, that people are truly good at 
heart.
” Horn notes that these words “flatter 
us. They make us feel forgiven.
” 
Horn writes, “Frank wrote about peo-
ple being ‘truly good at heart’ before 
meeting people who weren’t. Three 
weeks after writing these words, she met 
people who weren’t.” 
Holocaust museums around the world 
also make Horn feel uncomfortable, though 
she passionately believes we do need to 
learn and remember the facts. Whenever 
she detects a lesson to be learned, 
though, Horn gets that queasy feel-
ing. If we learn the details of how 
Jews were killed, without devoting 
much attention to how Jews lived 
and live, we can come to know 
those Jews as “people whose sole 
attribute was that they had been 
murdered and whose murders 
served a clear purpose, which was 
to teach us something” (xiv). 
Other essays in People Love 
Dead Jews focus on Varian Fry, 
the American diplomat who 
heroically saved dozens of the 
greatest musicians, writers and 
thinkers of Europe. An American 
heiress named Mary Jane Gold 
(not Jewish) provided funding the 
American government would not 
for the effort to save people whose 
“art had put them in danger.
” 
Fry’s life went downhill after the 
war and, as Horn demonstrates, 
the artists he had saved did little 
to help him. Horn notes that “it 
is easy to forget there are other 
values a culture might maintain, 
other people whom one could 
consider the guardians of civili-
zation instead of artists and intel-
lectuals — and that a large proportion of 
the people who were actually murdered 
in the Holocaust adhered to one of these 
alternatives.” 
She continues: “No rescue committee 
was convened on behalf of the many people 
who devoted their lives and careers … to 
the actual study of righteousness” (164-65). 
Read Dara Horn’s essay collection People 
Love Dead Jews. The book can help us learn 
to call things by their proper names.