Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
1. The Jewish Search for a Usable Past
2. The Library of Jewish Catastrophe
3. Ringelblum's Time Capsules
4. The Shtetl in Jewish Collective Memory
5. Rabbis, Rebels, and the Lost Art of the Law
6. The Golden Peacock: The Art of Song
7. A Culture Set in Stone: The Art of Burial
8. A City, a School, and a Utopian Experiment
9. Zionism, Israel, and the Search of a Covenantal Space
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Promotional Information

A lively tour of the landscape of modern Jewish memory sites from the Old and New Worlds and the Land of Israel.

About the Author

David G. Roskies is Professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. His books include Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture and A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling. He is founder and editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.

Reviews

Roskies (Jewish Theol. Seminary) shows that the Jewish present is not evolving as a simple continuation of the past nor, contrary to what is often claimed, is it emerging from a radical break with the past. It sits, rather, upon what Roskies calls memory sites, images of the past recreated from the ashes of destruction and the potentially debilitating sense of Jewish loss these catastrophes create. How are such memory sites created? Roskies illustrates the process through careful and engaging examinations of, among other topics, Jewish chronicles of the Warsaw Ghetto, of Jewish rethinking of Jewish participation in the early socialist and Zionist movements, and of the function of the concept of holy space for secular Israelis. These studies, each a gem unto itself, together reveal how Jews cope with loss and catastrophe and illustrate that it is exactly by coping with loss and tragedy that Jews create a usable past and, in the process, define their present and shape their future. Recommended for general readers and for faculty and researchers. —A. J. Aver
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