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Where Memory Leads
Cover of Where Memory Leads
Where Memory Leads
My Life
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A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's return to memoir, a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents, published in tandem with his classic work of Holocaust literature, When Memory Comes
 
Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with WHEN MEMORY COMES: THE LATER YEARS, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics.
 
Friedländer's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedländer goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others.
 
Most importantly, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's return to memoir, a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents, published in tandem with his classic work of Holocaust literature, When Memory Comes
 
Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with WHEN MEMORY COMES: THE LATER YEARS, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics.
 
Friedländer's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedländer goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others.
 
Most importantly, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
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Excerpts-
  • From the book Prologue
     
    How do you say “aubergines” in Hebrew? I’ve eaten hundreds, maybe thousands of aubergine dishes in my lifetime, particularly in Israel, and suddenly the word for it was gone. Strangely enough, the American English term surfaced immediately: eggplant. But never mind the English, it was the search for the Hebrew word that kept me awake. It was our last night in Paris. A few days earlier, in October 2012, we had celebrated my eightieth birthday. Tomorrow we’d be on our way back to L.A. At dinner we had a salade d’aubergines in a small restaurant close to the hotel and now, well past midnight, my wild chase continues. I notice that my wife has somehow half woken up. “What’s the salad we ate last night called in Hebrew?” In her half sleep, Orna manages to whisper, “Hatzilim.” Of course, hatzilim! What a relief! Now I can finally fall asleep. Damn it! What was the English word that had come up so easily? Oh yes: eggplant. That’s probably how the Dutch felt when they drained off seawater and secured a further patch of land: a victory against nature! Starting a book of memoirs with an episode of memory loss may seem like a joke. It is not; it is a real situation that nonetheless can be dealt with, as I will explain at the end of this prologue. Thirty-eight years ago, I published When Memory Comes, a memoir about my childhood and adolescence, focusing on my early life in Prague, the war years in France, adolescence in Paris, and my departure for Israel in June 1948. Some short glimpses of later years were included, up to 1977. In these pages, I turn to events that I hardly mentioned, or, in most cases, did not mention at all, between my return as a student to Paris in 1953 and the year preceding the publication of the early memoir, 1977. Then the narration goes on to this day (2015). As this text frequently deals with my reactions to and, sometimes, my involvement in public events, I opted, for the sake of clarity, to keep to an essentially chronological narrative. It so happens that the main clusters of events that I shall evoke indeed followed each other; thus, the text tells of a sequence that took place in real time. First come the years of apprenticeship, in which I move from place to place, from country to country, in search of an identity and a calling. The second part deals with Israel, at the very outset, then from about 1967 — when I started teaching in Jerusalem — to the early 1980s and, less intensively so, in the subsequent years. Germany follows, from segments of my early life to this day, but mainly as I experienced it during the eighties. The fourth part turns to life in the United States. No life progresses along such neat divisions, and issues dominant during one stage may carry over to all that comes thereafter. In this memoir in particular, the main issues — possibly less so regarding the American experience — are interwoven throughout. In short, these divisions represent temporary accentuations of one central issue during a given period, accentuations that are often narrated within the context of the minute incidents of everyday life. This book shows the influence of the Shoah (the Holocaust) on my personal life and on my reactions to Israel, Germany, and ultimately America. And, as the narration progresses, it also increasingly centers on the writing and teaching of history, particularly the history of the Holocaust, the essential work of my life. Thus, the writing of that history and, in my case, the unavoidable relation of memory to history is a recurring theme in each of the succeeding parts, even the first...
About the Author-
  • Saul Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli-American historian and currently a professor of history (emeritus) at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and lived in hiding during the German occupation of 1940–1944. His historical works have received great praise and recognition, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.
Reviews-
  • Kirkus

    A foremost Holocaust scholar carefully reflects on his harsh early years and lifelong academic mission in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Geneva, and Los Angeles.Writing this second memoir (When Memory Comes, 1977) in his early 80s, Friedlander (Emeritus, History/UCLA; Franz Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt, 2013, etc.) is acutely aware of a deteriorating memory and the need for emotional elucidation. He uses his early trauma of losing his parents during a roundup of Jews in southern France in 1942 as the point of departure for exploring the upheaval that characterized much of his adult life. Hidden in a Catholic seminary, the author was essentially orphaned when his parents were arrested at the Swiss border and sent to Auschwitz. Schooled in France as a fervent Catholic, Friedlander eventually ran away to join the Irgun youth movement in the new state of Israel in 1948--he admits his "core identity" is being a nonreligious Jew "yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else." From there, he began a peripatetic existence pursuing political science in Paris and becoming World Jewish Congress President Nachum Goldman's political secretary and later Shimon Peres' assistant, spending most of his time in Jerusalem. Ultimately, Friedlander would become both an apologist for Israeli policies and a critic of its racism toward the Palestinians. However, he embarked on graduate work in international studies in Geneva in 1961, pursuing his studies in his "monomaniacal way," supporting a family yet suffering from debilitating anxiety that required intensive drugs as well as psychoanalysis. His initial book exposing the complicity between Pius XII and the Nazi regime led him to devote his subsequent work to European fascism, modern anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. A "difficult stay in Berlin in the mid-eighties," when he was confronted by a new wave of "apologetic" scholarship about Nazi Germany, reinforced his decision about his work. Though dry in tone, the book is haunting in scope and depth. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Booklist

    October 15, 2016
    Israeli historian Friedlander received the Pulitzer Prize for The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 19391945 (2007). In this long-awaited conclusion to his two-part memoir, he traces his life from his decision to leave France for Israel in 1948 to his current position at UCLA. His is certainly a long, eventful life, filled with both internal and external contradictions and turmoil, along with great personal achievement. Born in 1932 in Prague, Friedlander fled with his parents to France as Nazi persecution of Jews intensified. In 1942, during the German occupation, he was hidden in a Catholic boarding school and even considered becoming a priest. After the war, with his Jewish identity reawakened, he arrived in Israel, and after serving in the army, he pursued academic inquiries that led him to France, Germany, and the U.S., and encounters and associations with personalities as diverse as Shimon Peres and former German admiral and convicted war criminal Karl Donitz. This is an often poignant rendering of a life brimming with both fulfillment and unsatisfied longings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

  • Kirkus

    Starred review from August 1, 2016
    A foremost Holocaust scholar carefully reflects on his harsh early years and lifelong academic mission in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Geneva, and Los Angeles.Writing this second memoir (When Memory Comes, 1977) in his early 80s, Friedlnder (Emeritus, History/UCLA; Franz Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt, 2013, etc.) is acutely aware of a deteriorating memory and the need for emotional elucidation. He uses his early trauma of losing his parents during a roundup of Jews in southern France in 1942 as the point of departure for exploring the upheaval that characterized much of his adult life. Hidden in a Catholic seminary, the author was essentially orphaned when his parents were arrested at the Swiss border and sent to Auschwitz. Schooled in France as a fervent Catholic, Friedlnder eventually ran away to join the Irgun youth movement in the new state of Israel in 1948he admits his core identity is being a nonreligious Jew yet indelibly marked by the Shoah. Ultimately, I am nothing else. From there, he began a peripatetic existence pursuing political science in Paris and becoming World Jewish Congress President Nachum Goldmans political secretary and later Shimon Peres assistant, spending most of his time in Jerusalem. Ultimately, Friedlnder would become both an apologist for Israeli policies and a critic of its racism toward the Palestinians. However, he embarked on graduate work in international studies in Geneva in 1961, pursuing his studies in his monomaniacal way, supporting a family yet suffering from debilitating anxiety that required intensive drugs as well as psychoanalysis. His initial book exposing the complicity between Pius XII and the Nazi regime led him to devote his subsequent work to European fascism, modern anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. A difficult stay in Berlin in the mid-eighties, when he was confronted by a new wave of apologetic scholarship about Nazi Germany, reinforced his decision about his work. Though dry in tone, the book is haunting in scope and depth.

    COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Wall Street Journal "Where Memory Leads is written in the key of history, a register that moves from meaning to message. Here, the author is crystal clear. 'The only lesson one could draw from the Shoah was precisely the imperative: stand against injustice.' Obligation fulfilled."
  • Library Journal "Friedländer is an engaging writer and personality. This is an important book for readers interested in intellectual history and the history of Israel."
  • Kirkus Reviews "A foremost Holocaust scholar carefully reflects on his harsh early years and lifelong academic mission in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Geneva, and Los Angeles...the book is haunting in scope and depth."
  • BookForum "Friedländer's memoir, in its rigorous attention to the major and minor devastations that his life has wrought, will set you thinking about your own responses to the collective damage of history. And yet, for all the gravity of his reflections, Friedländer is never self-important, nor does his prose swell. Indeed, it's a tribute to his consuming honesty and taste for understatement that the reader comes away with a sense of the complexity and hesitancy that marks a life that, in other hands, might have been presented as one long triumphal march."
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