Jewish Responses to Persecution

This impressive series provides a sense of the depth and diversity of contemporary Jewish documents while embedding them in explanatory narratives. . . . Volume V of the series aims to ‘trace and complicate’ the final year of the war and the beginnings of the postwar period. Probing a relatively large amount of Yiddish sources, a substantial number in French and German, as well as a few from a host of other languages, the volume examines how writing and commemorative practices related to the Holocaust first developed. It de-centers iconic experiences in order to reveal just how fraught and complex liberation and survival really were, and how contested the meaning of key concepts such as liberation, home, and return remained shortly after the end of the Holocaust. * Yad Vashem Studies *
A most welcome addition to an important series of source books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust. This concluding volume in the series offers a rich and wide-ranging set of documents that span the geographic, social, and ideological spectrum and are mindful of gender, class, and genre. This impressively contextualized collection of primary source material enriches our sense of this complex period. The book belongs on the shelves of all those teaching and researching the Holocaust and/or postwar Jewish and European history and culture.  -- Sara R. Horowitz, York University
Combining unpublished archival sources in several languages with cutting-edge scholarship, this collection breaks new ground in exposing a wide readership to primary documents that attest to the ambiguities of survival and liberation. Covering a remarkable spectrum of Holocaust experiences, the author does justice to differing Jewish outlooks and identities, sensitively illustrating challenging attempts to come to terms with loss and destruction and to find meaning in seemingly arbitrary survival. The volume opens an invaluable window onto the multifaceted ways in which Jews reflected, interpreted, and commemorated the Nazi genocide and what lessons survivors drew from their traumatic experiences in the immediate aftermath of World War II. -- Laura Jockusch, Brandeis University