Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times by Eyal Press (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Reviewed by Mark Oppenheimer

Would you have the courage to shelter Anne Frank? You would hope so, but doing the right thing can be a lonely choice, and require as much valour to bear the state of loneliness itself as any act of bravery. Consider Paul Grüninger, a State police officer in St Gallen, northeast Switzerland. He was a conservative, sang in the church choir; he was neither a worldly man, nor given to fits of moral introspection.

But before World War II he saved hundreds of Jewish refugees, stamping their arrival papers with dates just before August 19, 1938, when tighter immigration restrictions had gone into effect. In 1939, he was caught and fired.

Unemployed and broke, Paul Grüninger — one of the four brave men and women whom Eyal Press profiles in Beautiful Souls, his inquiry into what sort of person does the right thing when everyone else is doing evil — was refused a permit to open a pawn shop. Dogged by false rumours of sexual corruption, he peddled raincoats, greeting cards, even animal feed. Some Swiss Jews lent him money, but they needed to distance themselves from the disgraced Grüninger. Eventually he and his wife moved in with her parents.

‘In later years,’ Mr Press writes, Grüninger ‘could be spotted on occasion at a local restaurant owned by an acquaintance of his, sipping cider and munching on peanuts, among the cheapest items on the menu.’

What makes this book feel essential is not the admirably unobtrusive writing, nor any particular originality. Mr Press, a journalist for The Nation and other magazines, propounds no new theories, relying on thinkers from Adam Smith to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that what made the Holocaust possible was the rise of bureaucracy: when everybody is at a desk doing a discreet task, it is easy to disclaim responsibility for the policy carried out. If one follows Mr Bauman’s thinking, brave people are often those who have resisted being colonized by bureaucracy.

No, what makes you eager to push this book into the hands of the next person you meet are the small, still moments, epics captured in miniature, like the lonely man with his cider and peanuts.

Mr Press’s case studies — there’s also a Serbian soldier who rescued Croatians about to be sent to detention, an elite Israeli officer who refused to serve in the West Bank, and a financial adviser who blew the whistle on her corrupt Texas firm — capture how the price of moral courage is often not dramatic condemnation, not the martyr’s posthumous exaltation, but a lifelong sentence to sit apart, with no chance for appeal.

For example the Israeli soldier, Avner Wishnitzer, helped to spark a national debate about when it is appropriate to defy military orders, but for Mr Press the more interesting fact is that the soldier’s own mother, even as she defended his choices, was a little embarrassed by him.

Because most of us are not beautiful souls, we are made uncomfortable by those who are (even when they are our children). They stand as living rebukes to our cowardice. Mr Press wants to discover what kind of person risks that kind of aloneness.

Is it the religiously pious? Sometimes. But religious conviction can lead people to cause bloodshed too.

Is there a genetic predisposition to break ranks? Perhaps, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Maybe the refined intellectual, engaged with ideas, manages to think herself above petty concerns like nationalism? That was what Mr Press suspected he would find in Aleksander Jevtic, the Serb who pulled many Croatians from a line of men destined to be tortured or killed in 1991.

‘Aleksander Jevtic had somehow avoided internalizing this us-versus-them thinking,’ Mr. Press writes, ‘which I assumed had something do with his education and intellect, a rare skepticism and levelheadedness that enabled him to see past the blinding passions and compellingly simple ideas that drove the logic of hate.’

But when Mr Press at last meets Mr Jevtic, he finds not a Balkan Isaiah Berlin, nor a soldier-philosopher like Orwell.

This lifesaver, this ethical prince among men turns out to be something quite, quite different....

Full review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/books/eyal-press-considers-courage-in-beautiful-souls.html?_r=1&ref=books

Also by Eyal Press, Israel’s Holy Warriors, reviewed here: http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/05/13/israels_holy_warriors

Eyal Press on civil disobedience and insiders who become whistle blowers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GtyRi2iRM

Eyal Press on Wikipedia: http://keywiki.org/index.php/Eyal_Press

Reviewer Mark Oppenheimer writes the Beliefs column for The New York Times. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-oppenheimer 

Click here for a 20% discount on this and other books from Church Resources and John Garrett Publishing

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Click here for a 20% discount on this and other books from Church Resources and John Garrett Publishing