In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Dipolomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust

This remarkable biography is, in the author's words, a study of the ""banality of good."" Honored in Israel and Japan, yet still largely unknown in the West, Japanese diplomat and spy Chiune Sugihara, with this book, joins the ranks of Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler and other rescuers of Jews escaping Nazi persecution. While stationed at the Japanese consulate in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, with his wife and three children, and later in Nazi-occupied Prague and Konigsberg, Sugihara issued life-saving transit visas to thousands of Jews over the vehement objections of his superiors, thus enabling the fortunate recipients to traverse the Soviet Union, then Japan, to a new life. Levine, a sociologist who directs Boston University's Center for Judaic Studies, combed archives in Europe, crisscrossed Japan and interviewed Holocaust survivors whom Sugihara helped rescue. The cosmopolitan, affable Japanese diplomat was fired upon returning to Japan in 1947; he died in 1986 at the age of 86. In Levine's compelling analysis, Sugihara's rescue effort was motivated by love of life and a strong sense of justice, not by any special relationship to Jews or driving obsession--an ordinary man turned extraordinary hero. (Nov.)