The Jewish Search For A Usable Past

After redrawing the map of modern Jewish memory, David G. Roskies takes the reader on a grand tour of major memory sites, each of which is built upon foundations of rebellion, rupture, and loss: chronicles of catastrophe from the Warsaw ghetto that preserve a broken covenant; the symbolic landscape of an Old World shtetl; a gallery of rabbis and zaddikim who are really rebels in disguise; a repertoire of parodic songs; a failed revolution recast into an Honor Row of magnificent tombstones; and a Holy Land where the search for sacred space is led by those least likely ever to find it. The creativity with which Jews have coped with loss and catastrophe in modern times is richly revealed in this spirited account.