The final decline of lonely men is often a chronicle of self-delusion, persecution, mania, and paranoia. Lemkin’s final years had their share of these afflictions, but they were also marked by an aching awareness of the damage he was doing to himself. He appears to have been one of Kafka’s hunger artists, those moving, self-punishing creatures who cut themselves off from the world, preyed upon by a guilt they cannot name, making their misery into their life’s work. In some deep sense, Lemkin chose his own destruction, and refused consolations that less complex characters would have easily embraced. In his strangely lucid refusal of the available consolations of career and company, Lemkin recalls another hunger artist of the same period, the young French philosopher Simone Weil. She starved herself so as not to eat more than the citizens of occupied Europe and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in England in 1943, at the age of 34, after completing what she called her “war work” for the free French, a transcendent Declaration of the Duties of Mankind.

Other pioneers in the battle to rebuild the European conscience after World War II—René Cassin, who helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Hersch Lauterpacht, who wrote the first treatise calling for an enforceable international convention on human rights—would have regarded these Jewish hunger artists with baffled pity. Cassin, from an assimilated and republican Jewish family in the south of France, joined De Gaulle’s Free French in London like Weil, but unlike her, he never took it upon himself to suffer for others. Cassin went on to help to draft the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights, and served as a judge on the European Court of Human Rights. In 1968, he won the Nobel Prize for his work. Lauterpacht, a Polish Jew from the same region of eastern Poland as Lemkin, left before the killing began in the early 1920s, and went to England, where he enjoyed a triumphant academic career, culminating as Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge and a judge on the International Court of Justice. Like Lemkin, Lauterpacht watched helplessly from abroad as his entire Jewish family was destroyed in the Holocaust. Like Lemkin, he played an important role in the Nuremberg trials. Unlike Lemkin, he did not rage at Nuremberg’s limitations and proved capable of working in a team, helping to write the briefs that Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals, used to frame the indictment against the Nazi war criminals. As Jay Winter has argued in a fine recent study, both Cassin and Lauterpacht were Jewish insiders, while Lemkin remained an outsider, unmarried, untenured, unattached, and ultimately alone. His work on genocide finally became a trap from which he could not—and in the end did not wish to—escape.

Lemkin's autobiography resists easy explanations as to why this should have been so. All one can see clearly is that he had a perverse genius for steering away from available safe harbors. He was a Jew who resisted full identification with his people, so he was never a part of any of the Jewish communities or organizations that might have taken him in. He was a proud Pole who kept apart from Polish communities in the United States. He was a legal scholar too grimly obsessed with genocide to settle down with a stable academic career, though several beckoned, at Yale and at Rutgers. He was a human rights pioneer who quarreled with human rights advocates; a man who longed for company but had no time for small talk; a man who, as he ruefully confessed, always wanted to avoid three things in life—“to wear eyeglasses, to lose my hair and to become a refugee.” Now all three things, he said, “had come to me in implacable succession.”

From earliest childhood, Lemkin admitted to a peculiar fascination with tales of horror: the savagery of the Mongols, the cannibalistic rituals of primitive tribes, the brutal punishment that the Romans meted out to slave revolts. This obsession with human cruelty gave him the raison d’être of his life, but it could only have deepened his crippling isolation. One of the weirder and more poignant moments in his autobiography occurs when he meets a diminutive Chilean dancer in a half-empty ballroom of the Casino in Montreux in 1948, while he was working on the Genocide Convention. After dancing with her (“she danced with an exquisite slant, her eyes half closed”), he spent the night bizarrely regaling her with gruesome stories of the cruelties inflicted by the Spaniards on her Aztec ancestors.