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The Washington Post -- October 28, 2005 -- Jim Crow, Over There
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Alice Kaplan's 'The Interpreter' Deconstructs Executions of Black WWII
Soldiers -- By Wil Haygood -- The
crimes were rape and murder, and the punishments ranged from lengthy prison
sentences to a date on the gallows. Many of the hangings were in public,
town criers summoning villagers to gather around.
Alice Kaplan has written a book, "The Interpreter," about black and white
men who did heinous things in the European theater during World War II.
It is a tale about a Jim Crow Army with strict racial mores. She seeks to
show that white men who committed similar crimes received less severe
punishments, especially when it came to the meting out of death sentences...
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Saint Paul Pioneer Press (Minnesota) -- October
25, 2005 -- Unequal justice: Author uncovers sad WWII story --
The Interpreter by Alice Kaplan, Free Press -- By Mary Ann
Grossmann -- When Alice Kaplan was growing up in Minneapolis, she
liked to read through papers in her father's library. Sidney Kaplan,
who died when Alice was 7, had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg
war crimes trials, and his daughter learned to love research by
reading his letters, memos and transcripts. Kaplan is now a
professor at Duke University in North Carolina, where she founded
the Center for French and Francophone Studies. She has a passion for
France and for "finding people whose stories are missing or
unknown.''...
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The Boston Globe -- September 18, 2005 -- The
Interpreter By Alice Kaplan Free Press, 240 pp., illustrated, $25 --
By John Lukacs -- Sixty years after the end of World War II, we
know (and ought to know) more and more about many of its details.
They include troubles and dark pages in the record of the American
Army in Europe, where 70 US soldiers were tried and executed for
various crimes, usually by hanging. Most of them were black. It was
still a segregated army, and segregation, in most cases, involved
not only discrimination but injustice. One victim was James
Hendricks, a black soldier who on an August night in 1944 went out
drunk, in search of a Frenchwoman. He broke into two farmhouses...
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Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) -- September 11,
2005 -- The Interpreter By Alice Kaplan Free Press, 240 pp.,
illustrated, $25 -- By Martin Schmutterer -- Minneapolis native
Alice Kaplan, a distinguished literary historian and translator of
French literature at Duke University, continues her exploration of
the possibilities for justice in the wake of World War II. In her
previous work, "The Collaborator," Kaplan reconstructed the postwar
French trial of fascist Robert Brasillach. In "The Interpreter," she
turns to the Liberators. Her moral compass is Louis Guilloux, who
served as the military's interpreter in two courts-martial involving
charges of murder in liberated France...
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Sacramento Bee -- September 5, 2005 --
'Interpreter' explores issue of military injustice in WWII -- By
William Endicott -- The segregated military during World War II led
to many injustices against African American soldiers. Racism was as
much a fact of life for those in uniform as it was for their
families at home. Using a French novelist, Louis Guillox, as her
muse, author Alice Kaplan has produced a compelling look at the
racial disparities as they were played out in the military justice
system. She takes her title, "The Interpreter," from the fact that
Guillox served as an interpreter for Army courts-martial after the
post-D-Day liberation of France...
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Los Angeles Times -- September 5, 2005 -- Race,
crime and penalties for GIs in WWII -- By Michael S. Roth --
WHEN the U.S. Army invaded France, it wanted to make clear that it
did so as a liberating and not an occupying force. Gen. George S.
Patton issued a stern decree that soldiers convicted of crimes
against the local population would face the maximum penalties. We
might be forced to occupy the country, he argued, but we were not to
be confused with an occupying power...
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Library Journal – August 2, 2005 -- The
Interpreter by Alice Kaplan -- Kaplan (romance studies,
literature & history, Duke Univ.; The Collaborator: The trial and
Execution of Robert Brasillach) has written a brilliant account of
the trials of two American soldiers accused of murdering French
citizens in the waning days of World War II. One of the accused
soldiers, a black man named James Hendricks, was sentenced to death,
while the other, George Whittington, a white who had been proclaimed
a war hero, was acquitted. French political novelist Louis Guilloux
served as an interpreter at these trials...
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Publishers Weekly – July 25, 2005 -- The
Interpreter, Kaplan, Alice (Author), ISBN: 0743254244 -- Free
Press, Published 2005-09, Hardcover, $25.00 (256p) -- Less than 9%
of American soldiers in Europe during WWII were African-American,
but 55 out of 70 soldiers executed for crimes against civilians were
black. That's prima facie evidence of racial injustice, but in this
absorbing study historian Kaplan (whose The Collaborator won the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize in 2001) digs beneath the statistics to
explore how judicial bias operated on a practical level. She
examines two court-martial cases held in France: James Hendricks, a
black private hanged for killing a French farmer...
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